Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know About Morality

Descriptive Ethics
Nora Hämäläinen
Descriptive Ethics
What does Moral Philosophy
Know about Morality?
Nora Hämäläinen
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies

Uppsala, Sweden
ISBN 978-1-137-58616-2 ISBN 978-1-137-58617-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9
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We philosophers need to work with anthropologists, sociologists, sociobiologists,
psychologists, to find out what actual morality is; we need to read history to
find how it has changed itself, to read novels to see how it might change again.
Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. London:
Methuen, 1985, p. 224.
Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself
and immense field of work. All kinds of individual passions have to be
thought through and pursued through different ages, peoples, and great and
small individuals; all their reason and all their evaluations and perspectives
on things have to be brought into the light.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated, with commentary by
Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, pp. 81–82.
For Niklas
PREFACE
Academic writing is, with good reason, governed by an ideal of imperson-

ality. We report the end product, the scholarship and polished reasoning.
The authors’ struggles are not interesting, and anecdotal framing of a
study belongs to the retrospective prefaces written by eminent emeriti to
a second or third edition. But sometimes it may be good, for the purpose
of easier entrance into the line or reasoning, to let one’s readers share bits
of the background of a text.
This book was originally part of a larger and rather different work: a
philosophical study of the contemporary self-help culture. Looking at
contemporary literature of self-improvement as one of the most central
places where contemporary people reflect over good personhood,
duties, and the good life, I was convinced that what I do was not
merely cultural philosophy of some kind, but moral philosophy. It
seemed to me that a kind of freely applied cultural philosophy approach
was necessary for bringing out some aspects of our moral lives that
made moral philosophy an interesting pursuit in the first place. I did
not so much want to look behind our contingent forms of morality as I
wanted to look at them, in their complex, banal, quotidian manifesta-
tions. At the same time I had the vague idea that looking at them, as
contingent historical phenomena, would help me to deal with the
relationship between the historicity of morals and the moral claim to
universality. So, in addition to writing bits and pieces about popular
self-help and its more highbrow manifestations, I found myself doing
meta-philosophy by arguing for two interrelated views. First, I was
suggesting a cultural philosophy approach to ethics and second, I was
ix
x PREFACE
arguing that such an approach would dissolve the problems surround-

ing historicity and universality in ethics.
At a certain point I found that these meta-philosophical and methodo-
logical concerns were taking up too much space in my writing about self-
help, while being mostly uninteresting to those potential readers, in
different fields, who have a primary interest in self-help per se. It also
seemed to me that self-help became a means to working through metho-
dological issues in philosophy, where it deserved full attention on its own.
Thus I eventually separated the explicit methodological material from the
larger project and let it grow into the shape of this long essay. I am still
here arguing for a cultural philosophy approach to ethics. I am concerned
with articulating what such an approach could be, how it differs from the
concerns of mainstream Anglophone ethics, and most centrally how it
links to some central works in twentieth-century philosophy. The histori-
city of morals and its relation to claims to universality are of course too
large topics for this book, but I will provide some preliminary pointers
toward how the relationship between historicity and our deepest moral
commitments could be addressed under the auspices of a descriptive
ethics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written as part of my work as a fellow of the Helsinki

Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2013–2016. Special thanks go to
Niklas Forsberg, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Sari Kivistö, Sami Pihlström,
Merja Polvinen, Eva Johanna Holmberg, and the wonderful interdisci-
plinary research community at the HCAS.
xi
CONTENTS
1 Introduction—or What Does Moral Philosophy

Know about Morality? 1
2 Moral Philosophy Today 7
3 Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers 15
4 The Foundational Project of Ethics and a Different Way

of Going Below the Surface 27
5 The Challenge from X-phi 37
6 Dewey’s Empirical Ethics 49
7 Wittgensteinian Applications 59
8 Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy of the Self 73
9 Charles Taylor’s Affirmation of the Modern Self 91
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
10 The “Merely Descriptive” and the “Empirical” Revisited 107
11 Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher 117
Literature 129
Index 135
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—or What Does Moral

Philosophy Know about Morality?
Abstract Hämäläinen introduces the idea of descriptive ethics as a

topic unduly neglected by contemporary philosophers. She argues,
first, that philosophical ethics cannot be pursued in meaningful ways
without substantial descriptive or comparative work, which often ben-
efits from other sciences as well as the arts. Second, she argues that the
main reason why the projects of descriptive ethics are left to others is
that there is in today’s philosophical ethics too little understanding of
the philosophical import of descriptive work and the philosophical
hazards involved in such work.
Keyword Descriptive ethics
This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy.

By the descriptive task I mean here the challenge of providing rich and
accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms, under
which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the
human animal or human nature. Today this kind of research is often
conducted by intellectual historians, social historians, sociologists, anthro-
pologists, or researchers in cultural studies, for example, while philosophers
concentrate on normative ethical theory, the conceptual and ontological
inquiries of metaethics, or questions of putting theories to work in applied
ethics. And indeed, we may think this is as it should be, by definition.
© The Author(s) 2016 1

N. Hämäläinen, Descriptive Ethics,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_1
2 DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS
According to the (current) Encyclopaedia Britannica on the web

“Comparative ethics, also called Descriptive Ethics” is
the empirical (observational) study of the moral beliefs and practices of

different peoples and cultures in various places and times. It aims not only
to elaborate such beliefs and practices but also to understand them insofar as
they are causally conditioned by social, economic, and geographic circum-
stances. Comparative ethics, in contrast to normative ethics, is thus the proper
subject matter of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology,
and psychology). (http://global.britannica.com/topic/comparative-ethics)
The contrasted normative ethics, in its turn, is described as
that part of moral philosophy, or ethics, concerned with criteria of what is

morally right and wrong. It includes the formulation of moral rules that have
direct implications for what human actions, institutions, and ways of life
should be like. (http://global.britannica.com/topic/normative-ethics)
Metaethics, the constant companion of normative ethics in the field of

moral philosophy, is described as follows:
the subdiscipline of ethics concerned with the nature of ethical theories and
moral judgments. . . . Major metaethical theories include naturalism, non-
naturalism (or intuitionism), emotivism, and prescriptivism. (http://global.
britannica.com/topic/metaethics)
I cite these entries because they state what is commonplace and yet deeply
problematic: first, a habitual and institutional separation of the study of
the good and right (and the “nature,” i.e., ontology, of good and right)
from the study of the ways of life that condition ideas and practices
concerning the good and the right. And second, a severing of the study
of ways of life from the body of moral philosophy, leaving it to other
disciplines or to the obscure and peripheral tracts of philosophical study
that sometimes go under the name of cultural philosophy. (The search
term “cultural philosophy” leads in the mentioned encyclopedia, inexplic-
ably and only, to the late literary critic, novelist, and semiotician Umberto
Eco, from which we are led to assume that this is not a common search
word or important topic.) The philosopher, according to the habitual
division of labor, has little to do with cultural analysis, with attempts to
understand what is contingent and fleeting in his surroundings.
1 WHAT DOES MORAL PHILOSOPHY KNOW ABOUT MORALITY? 3
Obviously some projects of descriptive ethics are left to others because

philosophers lack the appropriate means to conduct various kinds of study
that may add to our knowledge about human life. Experimental psychology
can systematically get at empirical aspects of people’s moral responses that
cannot be accessed by philosophical reason alone. Work in moral history
requires sustained archival work of a kind that philosophers may be poorly
trained to conduct and temperamentally disinclined to learn. Sociological
research can bring out how people make sense of their moral choices, but the
use of interviews is not part of the philosopher’s toolbox.
In contrast to any easy division of intellectual labor, however, I argue
two things. First, that philosophical ethics cannot be pursued in mean-
ingful ways without substantial descriptive or comparative work, which
often benefits from other sciences as well as the arts. Second, that the main
reason why the projects of descriptive ethics are left to others is that there
is in today’s philosophical ethics too little appreciation of the philosophical
import of descriptive work and the philosophical hazards involved in such
work. Normative ethics is never just normative, but is based on an inter-
pretation of our moral situation. And conversely any articulation of our
situation involves covert normative emphases and implications that should
awaken a philosopher’s critical instincts. Much of the polemics about
initial description of our moral situations is muffled by the philosophers’
eagerness to proceed to argument and theorization. Pictures and perspec-
tives are taken for granted, and not submitted to careful scrutiny, because
making pictures and perspectives does not match the philosophers’ idea of
the work of reason. Work on descriptive starting points is far from non-
existent in philosophy but it is continuously placed in the margins of
philosophical ethics.
My target here is moral philosophy as pursued in the analytic tradition
broadly conceived, including ethics after Wittgenstein, neo-pragmatism,
and some boundary crossing work, but excluding work done within the
continental traditions: phenomenology, critical theory, and existentialism.
Some of the points raised here, concerning philosophy and empirical
research, may be applicable to discussions in these traditions too, but to
sort this out will be beyond the scope of this small book. Traditionally the
continental traditions have much more lively connections to literature,
social research, anthropology, and social criticism, which protects them to
a certain extent from the intellectual isolation and technicalization that
often besets analytic moral philosophy. Indeed, a reconnection to sub-
stantial descriptive work in moral philosophy may involve the activation of
not only resources that are already there within the analytic tradition
(Wittgenstein and pragmatism), but also resources that are most likely to
be seen as external, like the work of Foucault. My aim, however, is not to
hold up any other modern tradition as a model for analytic moral philo-
sophy: It is rather to look for ways in which analytic moral philosophy can
become more alive to real-life morality.
Thus let us begin with setting the stage. Any philosophical project on
morals is dependent on a broad variety of actual or potential insights
that are not received through philosophical reasoning alone. As Iris
Murdoch puts it, in moral philosophy “the examination should be
realistic. Human nature, as opposed to the natures of other hypothetical
spiritual beings, has certain discoverable attributes, and these should be
suitably considered in any discussion of morality” (Murdoch 1997,
pp. 363–364).
Realism here does not indicate a metaphysical position, but the very
ordinary idea that our account should not be fanciful, biased, simplified, or
shaped by untenable idealizations. The crucial question is how the “dis-
coverable attributes” of human beings and their surroundings and situa-
tions are expected (1) to be recorded and (2) to influence work in moral
philosophy. Many philosophers seem to be content with reliance on a
rather humdrum philosophical commonsense, upon which ethical theories
and metaethics are built. In this view, a reasonable understanding of
human affairs to ground moral theory is relatively easy to achieve and
does not require much empirical or descriptive efforts.
The call for a realistic consideration of human attributes can also be
understood as a call to extend the philosophers’ knowledge about moral
life in rather specific and circumscribed ways. An example of this could be
the increasing reliance on experimental psychology in moral philosophy.
But the call to “realism,” in Murdoch’s sense, can also, further, be
understood as a call to consider the factual, empirical, and historical world
of human morals as a source of sustained wonder and continuous inquiry.
This is the starting point of a descriptive philosophical ethics: the idea that
moral philosophers need to put a great deal of effort into the description
of moral life and into the (broadly) empirical acquisition of different kinds
of knowledge about morality, values, and human beings. As Annette Baier
puts it, “We philosophers need to work with anthropologists, sociologists,
sociobiologists, psychologists, to find out what actual morality is; we need
to read history to find how it has changed itself, to read novels to see how
it might change again” (Baier 1985, p. 224).
1 WHAT DOES MORAL PHILOSOPHY KNOW ABOUT MORALITY? 5
Baier’s call to “find out what actual morality is” should be read in the
context of the late-twentieth-century “anti-theory” debate where a num-
ber of philosophers, including Baier, Bernard Williams, Peter Winch, Cora
Diamond, and Charles Taylor, challenged the then current (though fairly
young) paradigm of normative ethical theory, on the one hand, and
metaethics, on the other. This debate was received mainly as a negative
intervention, a repudiation of normative theorizing in ethics. But this is
only one part of the story. The other, neglected but more important part is
the call for a different kind of inquiry in ethics: one which seeks to know all
kinds of things about actual moralities instead of constructing an abstract
theoretical edifice. The confrontational antitheoretical posture has by now
lost much of its appeal, but the descriptive and empirical appetites are
thriving in various places: in the post-Wittgensteinian call for a return to
“the ordinary” (Forsberg 2013), in the broad ethical interest in literature
and film, in moral psychology, in experimental philosophy and pragmatist
ethics.
Although modern moral philosophy, arguably, has focused its energies
on other things than describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral
frameworks and practices, a present-day philosopher, inclined in this
direction, finds resources for a more descriptive or empirical philosophy
in the work of some of the most central philosophers of the twentieth
century. I will in Chaps. 6–9 discuss how the descriptive ideal of ethics is
instantiated, in different ways, by John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, and by thinkers inspired by them.
This selection of four philosophers, in addition to providing central
sources today for a descriptive philosophical ethics, has also the benefit
of bringing different themes for a contemporary descriptive project into
view: Dewey’s scientific and empirical emphases, Wittgenstein’s low-key
descriptions of everyday (linguistic) practices, and Foucault’s and Taylor’s
different genealogies of modern personhood and modern frameworks of
value.
I will investigate how the ideas of these philosophers and their followers
in four very different ways feed into the project of a contemporary “descrip-
tive” and yet philosophical ethics. I will highlight how the descriptive
projects are put forward by these thinkers: as paths to various knowledge
about morality and also as paths to intellectual and moral self-knowledge.
But before turning to these philosophers, I will in Chaps. 2–5 discuss the
state of moral philosophy today: its theoretical emphases, aims, and internal
mode of organization. Where mainstream analytic moral theory seeks to go
“below the surface” of everyday morality by providing rational grounds and

procedures for moral thought and action, the contending philosophers of
the “descriptive” project seek to do the same by investigating the frame-
works of value that are ours, that are at work in our supposedly most
universal moral precepts, and that we nonetheless often fail to understand
and account for. But when read in terms of the current division of labor in
ethical study, as exemplified by the Britannica, the efforts of the latter tend
to be misunderstood, either as not addressing questions of moral philosophy
or as trying to do so in a way which is lacking in critical penetration.
Thus, the first part of the book describes how the field of moral philo-
sophy today is formed: its central concerns as well as major dissenting
voices. The second part, Chap. 6 onward, proceeds to reassemble the
philosophical study of morality around descriptive (rather than normative
and theoretical) efforts, leaning on ideas derived from four major twentieth-
century philosophical figures.
My primary concern in this book is to make a place for descriptive
efforts at the heart of moral philosophy, drawing on resources both
internal and external to the philosophical tradition. The aim is to make
moral philosophy richer and more responsive to lived morality and extra-
philosophical insights about moral life. For this purpose, we need a
clearer understanding of the philosophical thrust of descriptive accounts
of the moral life, moral practices, and moral change, and we need to
reconnect to a tradition within the tradition of moral philosophy where
this work is considered essential.
But philosophy, philosophical thought, and the philosophical traditions
also make an irreducible contribution to the projects of descriptive ethics.
Descriptive ethics is never just descriptive: It involves, rather, a complex
element of normative or evaluative struggle, as well as complex conceptual
work, in which philosophers are at home and which they thus may be
particularly well prepared to deal with. Moral philosophers are not just in
need of descriptive efforts: They can also contribute to these efforts in
distinctive ways, especially when it comes to mediating between our
(sociological, anthropological, historical) observations of moral forms of
life and the judgments we make in our practical moral lives. This is what
philosophy could be at its best. But this role of a mediator and practical
thinker cannot be credibly shouldered by academics who are ignorant and
careless about existing moralities and their constitution.
CHAPTER 2
Moral Philosophy Today
Abstract Hämäläinen presents a methodological problem in contempor-

ary moral philosophy: the problem of implicit methodological rules and
boundaries that make it difficult to include, into moral philosophy, a rich
account of our moral present. She develops the notion of a “moral pre-
sent”: a communal framework of action and valuations, which not only
sets the standard for our individual judgments, but is also responsive to the
constant ongoing negotiation of practices and norms in human societies.
She suggests that this moral present should be a central concern for moral
philosophers.
Keyword Moral present
What do we do when we do moral philosophy? Philosophy does not have a

clear methodology, or even plural distinct methodologies. This is not
exactly the kind of thing that we are taught in Philosophy 101, but quite
soon, when comparing our curricula with students of other subjects, we
learn that there is something that other fields have and philosophy has not.
Philosophy demands a number of skills that are trained and exercised in
philosophy studies, in teaching, and in research, but these skills do not
constitute a body of methods that can be applied to a range of given
subjects. Philosophy is done in a tradition (or a number of traditions),
but such a tradition does not provide one with a specific set of methods

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_2
that one can simply go on using on new objects of inquiry or teach to a

student who then can go on using them. A familiar problem for philoso-
phers who have tried to write a research proposal according to a common
format used for all fields of research is that the “theory and method”
section, or its equivalent, ends up sounding empty or repeating things
already stated elsewhere. A research project in philosophy most often does
not use a “method” quite in the same sense as most other fields of research
do. What we learn is perhaps better described as a craft, a practical capacity
of carrying on with philosophical discussions, to go on doing whatever we
think Aristotle or Descartes or Kant or Wittgenstein or Rawls were doing.
And mostly what we do ends up being very different from the work of
our heroes.
Yet, this lack of a given methodology or set of methodologies does not
mean that philosophy would not have what we could call methodological
problems. Such problems, though often passed by in silence, are encoun-
tered in situations where a philosopher wants to pursue an inquiry in a
direction where there are no given conventions for how to go on, or where
the local conventions within one’s philosophical subfield seem to exclude
the kind of inquiry one wants to undertake. Or when a philosopher finds
interesting insights in neighboring fields but finds it hard to bring them
home to her own philosophical debates. Interdisciplinary work is often
encouraged in theory but discouraged in practice, not least because it is
difficult.
Thus, what is at stake here is a kind of methodological problem. I am
concerned with the limits of analytic moral philosophy and its thin relation
to what I, in the absence of a better label, call the moral present. I will
suggest that this thin relation has far-reaching consequences for at least two
issues that are of central importance for the practice of moral philosophy.
First, it hampers the philosopher’s capacity to attend, professionally,
to a variety of moral phenomena in our present, placing moral philosophy
at a disadvantage, when talking about morally interesting issues, as com-
pared to scholars and researchers in a variety of other fields. Sociologists
(like journalists) are traditionally quick on the uptake when it comes to
recognizing and naming pertinent aspects of social development: often
aspects that are of fundamentally moral significance. Examples that easily
come to mind are the sociological attention to consumer practices, the
emergence of a psychological framework of understanding the human
(Rieff 2006), the human cost of service work (Hoschchild 2012),1 and
the present-day American punitive system (Goffman 2014). Cultural
2 MORAL PHILOSOPHY TODAY 9
studies and media studies more or less by definition grasp the present and
emerging moral aspects of people’s seemingly humdrum realities: the moral
charge of the relationship between face-to-face encounters and social media,
for example. Anthropology too, especially when practiced in settings close
to home, can exhibit this kind of immediacy. Research in these and border-
ing disciplines often not only addresses morally interesting issues, but also
takes reflective moral stances and, most importantly, shapes the terms by
which we collectively come to think about these matters.
Philosophers are in no way barred from such exchanges, but are rarely,
for reasons that I will discuss more carefully below, at the forefront of such
discussions, nor are they often fundamentally affected, in their own think-
ing, by attention to such discussions. Philosophers stay aloof and at a
distance, producing technical advances in rather academic debates, for
each other and for those who care to listen. Relying on rather Weberian
idea of science as vocation (Weber 1946), they contribute preferably in
local, limited, and technical ways to a collective body of philosophical
knowledge, and keep clear of the dilettantism and eclecticism that is
frequently required when addressing the pressing questions of daily life.
Most likely to get their hands dirty are philosophers who in addition to
philosophy have a second home in some other discipline or who work in
inherently interdisciplinary fields like gender studies.
The specialization and compartmentalization in philosophy is a natural
consequence of the growth of academic research in the past 50 years. It is
often impossible to be both competent and creatively productive in many
fields at once, to the effect that knowledge between fields of study or even
between specific discussions travels in haphazard ways or not at all.
Exchange between different discussions is also hampered by very different
premises and presuppositions. The most competent and distinctive con-
tributions, not only in analytic philosophy, but also in other fields of study,
tend to be those that are made rather deep within the given tradition.
Analytic philosophy, with its identity closely aligned to science, has
generally (Wittgensteinians and pragmatists excluded) welcomed techni-
calization as advance. But the scientific ethos of analytic philosophy has
the melancholy consequence of leaving the philosopher’s work in the
margins of contemporary moral thought. To the detriment of philoso-
phers as well as to the detriment of the things philosophers specifically
could contribute to making sense of our moral present, analytic philoso-
phy is not a field people in other fields or in society at large would turn to
in search for illumination on morally interesting questions.
Second, and more importantly, philosophy’s thin relation to the moral

present not only makes analytic philosophers potentially awkward in
debates that set the tone for how moral phenomena are talked about
and made sense of among a wider intellectual public. It is also bound to
limit their self-understanding, by which I mean their capacity to under-
stand the relationship between their philosophical ideas and their under-
lying contingent cultural frameworks. This is more important because it
condemns moral philosophy not only to the relative obscurity of a specia-
lized discipline, but also to a state of inherent lack of transparency, when
the deep cultural biases of its idea of morality are left unacknowledged and
unprocessed.
I am not addressing these issues as the problems of individuals. They are
not simple products of neglect or laziness. Keeping up with the latest
developments in even one subdiscipline of contemporary academic ethics
is hard work in its own right, which means that we all need to prioritize.
Neither should the problem be attributed to a nerdy narrow professional
outlook. Many analytic philosophers are knowledgeable in fields of
research far beyond their primary research topics, within and outside
philosophy. Many have a parallel life as public intellectuals, writing essays
and book reviews on a variety of topics. What concerns me here is the
shape and direction of a busy, competent professional practice that for
underlying, vaguely historical and methodological reasons shoulders out
much of what looks like the very substance of its subject matter.
2.1 EVERYDAY NORMATIVITY AND THE MORAL PRESENT

So what could be meant here by the moral present? I use this phrase as a
makeshift label for talking about a historically contingent, evolving, multi-
layered situation of things, values, and forms of life. As always, human
beings are today shaping their life world by engaging in various kinds of
talk and behavior: at the faculty meeting, by the sandbox, in the sandbox, in
the hospital ward, at school, over a cup of coffee. Much of our talk and
behavior is often not conceived as normative, it is just chatting, passing the
time, exchanging news, exchanging glances, doing one’s work. Yet it shapes
us and makes us part of the whole, in ways that are quite necessary for the
workings of a human society. The normative aspect of many of our everyday
doings is often most clearly felt at points of transition, when one enters a
new context, with a new set of norms and values. A girl, for example, goes
to high school and is plunged into a confusing new world of teenage life.
Of course this world is new for most of her peers too, which gives rise to
a period of heightened (though often implicit) normative negotiation and
fervent reading of magazines, fashion blogs, or whatever the current
windows to the teenage and adult worlds may be. No one actually has the
power to set the norm; it is somehow done together, or by no one—
although different individuals may have different roles in instating and
upholding it.
Some years later, the girl has her first child and encounters the local
parenting culture, in play groups, at the playground, or wherever she
comes into contact with other people’s ways of dealing with their parallel
situations. Since most new parents find it of utmost importance to do
things right in relation to their children, this is for many a period of
unforeseen immersion in normative suggestions, many of which are starkly
incompatible. Nursing 24/7? Is milk-based formula bad? Of course the
baby must be used to bottle feeding from the start? Surely ecological
cotton is better for the child? Cloth diapers! How soon and how
frequently can or should the child be left to other caretakers? Of course
the mom should be back in shape in a couple of weeks? Or is it perhaps
part of being a mother that one does not pay too much attention to one’s
figure or one’s career?
This bundle of concerns exhibits a striking mixture of questions
concerning our fundamental duties to self and others, on the one
hand, and rather superficial group habits and fashions, on the other.
For some people, in some situations—indeed, perhaps, for most of us,
in most situations—engaging actively in these kinds of social negotia-
tions comes naturally. For others these negotiations are just a faint
background noise, like rush hour traffic on a distant highway; they
may participate, but do so, mostly, without knowing they do. Others,
still, are from time to time inclined to experience chock and alienation,
perhaps because they have difficulties adapting and difficulties picking
up novel implicit norms, because they feel inadequate or happen to
disapprove of aspects of a certain new culture they are immersed in: the
cruelty of the teenage world, the materialism and self-importance of
contemporary Western middle-class parenting, the stupidity of the
leading normative voices of their social circle, the single-minded pursuit
of profit at the work place. Normativity is often most keenly perceived
when it is not fully shared.
Many changes in normative expectations and frameworks occur with-
out notice, as our life circumstances change. Others are brought about
through political activity, such as consciousness raising. Some of the

normative changes we perceive over time in our social environments are
perhaps best described as aesthetic (fashion, “interesting” food, how to
groom one’s bodily hair). Other changes are easily perceived as fundamen-
tally moral (attitudes to physical punishment of children, treatment of
ethnic minorities and immigrants, etc.). Many changes in our normative
attitudes seem to involve a mixture, indeed a negotiation, of ethical and
aesthetic issues: How to live in style without too large an ecological
footprint (a great source of middle-class self-deception)? Others involve
a negotiation between issues of propriety, civility, and normality, on the
one hand, and deeply held issues of conscience, on the other (How to be a
vegan without offending one’s grandmother and causing fuss?). One of
the great puzzles of twentieth-century moral history is the social negotia-
tion in 1930s Germany that made the Holocaust possible. How indeed?
Some would say that it was because “normality” took a twisted turn,
because what we like to think of as deeply held ideals of moral equality,
of the inviolability of human life and dignity were given up for the fascist
new “normal.” Nothing utterly strange about this, perhaps, considering
how we too put up with or ignore things we consider bad—sweat shop
labor, permanent refugee camps with permanent inhabitants, military
interventions abroad, and mechanisms of utter social exclusion (home-
lessness, long-term unemployment)—to sustain the kind of life we think of
as normal.
We talk, write, and do things in terms of good, bad, and OK. While
going about our businesses, we build a world of things, places, practices,
and institutions that reinforce our valuations or cause them to change.
There is often no simple way of a priori separating “the really deep issues”
of good and evil that interest moral philosophy from this constant move-
ment. The deep issues are a part of the general movement: part of our
successively changing lives and equally changing understanding of what it
means to be good, what is good enough, what is worthy, what is normal,
admirable, beautiful, and so on. “Deep” and “superficial” intermingle in
complex ways.
Although much of this normative negotiation is implicit, there is also an
incessant stream of it which is verbally transmitted and easily accessible in a
variety of forms in our everyday lives: in conversations, in newspapers and
journals, in social media. Analyzing the variety of normative talk and
writing in one’s own society forces one to reflect on how one is complexly
implicated in (or excluded from) various normative practices. One quickly
comes to see how many of our purportedly neutral descriptions of life and
society are deeply normative and incline us to see and value in certain ways.
This is one of the great insights of Iris Murdoch, still insufficiently appre-
ciated in her native context of Anglophone moral philosophy. Murdoch
persistently strove to show how our very cognition of the world, and our
seemingly most factual and most trivial beliefs about it, are soaked in
evaluation and indeed morality. As she notes: “The moral life is not
intermittent or specialized, it is not a peculiar separate area of our exis-
tence. … (‘But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?’
Yes, roughly)” (Murdoch 1992, p. 495). Just think of the frequency of the
root metaphors of war or survival of the fittest in descriptions of inherently
peaceful economic interactions; the victory of social competence over
“moral goodness” in contemporary, casual, Western rhetoric of child
rearing; or the focus on unnatural physical perfection in women’s maga-
zines. Or, to take a more positive example, think of the status of the
individual person (i.e., any individual person) as the locus of unquestion-
able moral entitlement, which one can rhetorically get around, but not go
against in contemporary public debates. These are historically contingent
details of our contemporary moral world, which consists both of things we
can perceive and criticize and of things that merge with the background of
our everyday existence, invisible to us, though perhaps already striking and
odd to our grandchildren.
Contemporary social sciences deal essentially with contingency and
change, and thus think of human beings as unwittingly active and in
some sense constitutive participants in forms of life that are historically
formed, have a basis in our material conditions and power structures, and
set the limits of what we can see and think and believe and conceive as
good. These perspectives give access to a broad range of materials for a
descriptive ethics.
Most analytic moral philosophy, in contrast, takes little interest in the
contents and forms of these ongoing negotiations of values and norms,
and enquiries in analytic moral philosophy shed little light on them. To be
more exact, moral theorists do often attempt to shed light on contempor-
ary negotiations of the good and right, but do so through interventions
that seek to replace the ongoing muddle with clear principles for norma-
tive thought. This can of course involve insightful considerations on
challenging topics. But to get a rich and complex view of our practical
and evaluative frameworks, and the constitutive activity that goes
on within them, is not seen as a central part of the analytic moral
philosopher’s professional task. This is not to say that our actual moral
present, in a thick descriptive sense, has no presence in moral philosophy.
It is rather the case that descriptive insights enter philosophy in a piece-
meal manner and are accommodated to the academic habits of moral
philosophers, rather than challenging them to a richer engagement with
understanding our present.
NOTE
1. Rieff ’s and Hochschild’s classic books on these topics were published in
1966 and 1983, respectively.
CHAPTER 3
Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers
Abstract This chapter presents five different ways in which contemporary

moral philosophers reach for descriptive knowledge about morality,
values, and conceptions of the good. These include intuition, narrative
literature/film, moral histories, experimental and empirical work, and
contemporary “hard cases.” What is interesting about these entrances for
knowledge about contingent moralities into philosophy is how they all, in
different ways, both open and close the door to a richly descriptive take on
ethics.
Keywords Intuition Ethics and narrative Moral histories Experimental

ethics
To get a clearer view of the nature of the descriptive limitations of con-

temporary moral philosophy, I will turn briefly to discuss five different
ways in which real-life moral understanding does enter philosophy. These
are the philosophical uses of (1) intuition and common knowledge, (2)
narrative literature, (3) moral histories, (4) empirical research on morality,
and (5) the use of “contemporary” examples. What is interesting about
these entrances for knowledge about contingent moralities into philoso-
phy is how they all both open and close the door to a richly descriptive
take on ethics.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_3
3.1 INTUITION
There is a widespread, though not universally accepted, principle in
analytic ethics that the moral “intuitions” of a normal, “morally com-
petent” person are a relevant check on the correctness of philosophical
theories and ideas. Most philosophers consider themselves to be such
persons and are thus reasonably confident in using their own intuitions
as the relevant frame of judgment. If a conclusion generated by one’s
new theory is revolting, then there might be something wrong with the
theory. Many of the typical, somewhat strained, philosophers’ examples
in ethics, for example, trolley cases, are designed to test our intuitions
concerning the acceptability of the practical implications of philosophical
theories. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that analytic moral philo-
sophers, mostly, are strongly inclined to remodel their theories if they
go against strong, widespread intuitions.
Yet, not everyone accepts this veto of intuition. Intuitions, as we
know, are notoriously variant, conflicting, and thus…unreliable?
A curious example of flouting intuitions is David Benatar’s book Better
Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006), where
the author argues that it would be better not to be born, since life
necessarily causes us to experience various evils that would have been
avoided had we not existed. Most people’s intuition would be that this
cannot be right, that there must be something seriously wrong with
the theory, if it is to be seen as a theory meant to elucidate human
morality. One way of disentangling this sense of wrongness would be
to argue that Benatar’s scenario is not about morality at all, since
morality, the good, is an aspect of human existence, life, society, not
a force of the universe. We may apply the idea of “better not to have
been” to people who are born to nothing but severe pain and suffer-
ing, but we do so with a certain kind of unease and are prompted by
quite specific and local considerations. An approach from nowhere in
this quite radical manner is likely to elicit the reaction that this at least
is not the kind of objectivity we are engaged in when talking about
morality. Benatar quite purposively challenges the role of intuitions in
moral philosophy, to the benefit of a kind of theoretical consistency.
But his case may actually be used to illustrate the centrality of intuition
in moral philosophy. It tests the limits of how far philosophers are
willing to disregard intuition, and the answer, in most cases, is: not
very far. Indeed if we are removed too far from common moral
3 MORALITY AS KNOWN BY MORAL PHILOSOPHERS 17
assumptions or intuitions, we are inclined to start questioning the

relevance of the theory for morality in the first place. In which sense
is Benatar’s view a moral one, relevant for human morality?1
In a different register, the moral philosopher’s reference to intuition has
been questioned on the basis that it is really quite unclear what these
intuitions consist of.2 They are kinds of judgments about rightness and
wrongness that rest on culturally specific, historically contingent, unana-
lyzed and often even unanalyzable material, mixed with (semi-biological)
gut reactions. The very concept of “intuition” may be seen as a proble-
matic category for the casual real-life checking that goes on in philosophi-
cal discussions, because it seems to bracket out the complex constitution
of our nonreflective responses, suggesting that we are consulting some-
thing rather distinctive, simple, and stable.
Stripped of these assumptions of simplicity and stability, reference to
intuition is a central way in which our everyday moral world, our histori-
cally contingent moral present, enters into moral philosophy. Our every-
day moral world is consulted for guidance in the form of “intuitive”
moral response, in order to keep the theory under construction or
reconstruction close enough to ordinary morality and keep it from
straying too far, as Benatar’s does. In this role, the armchair reaction of
“this cannot be right” has an overwhelmingly strong foothold in philo-
sophical ethics. But precisely by packaging the sought real-life input as
“intuition,” this procedure closes the door on a potential serious inquiry
into what these reactions are made of—an approach that would open up
to a broad descriptive inquiry.
3.2 NARRATIVE LITERATURE, FILM

From the 1980s on, a number of more or less analytic philosophers, most
influentially Martha Nussbaum (1986, 1990), Stanley Cavell (2003), and
Cora Diamond (1991), have argued for the benefits of considering narra-
tive literature in a context of moral philosophy. Cavell (1979) and Stephen
Mulhall (2001) are among those who have made a parallel case concerning
film. Narrative art provides us with images to think with; it engages the
imagination and teases out a variety of perspectives, reactions, and trains of
thought which are not easily brought out by means of philosophical
texts alone. This does not mean that philosophers would seek direct
guidance from literary texts or films, but rather that fictional people and
situations—and the artistic and intellectual work of literary authors and
filmmakers—are used as sounding boards for eliciting a more complex and

nuanced reflection on the part of the philosopher.
This inclusion of literature and film into analytic moral philosophy has
brought about an important widening of the “real-life” input in moral
philosophy, not necessarily because literary works would give an accurate
picture of lived morality or moral reality, but rather because literary works
give various pictures of reality which we must relate to, asses, reflect upon.
Narrative works of art are, in a variety of ways, about reality, and this
“aboutness” is what makes them helpful in eliciting more nuanced moral
reflections on the part of the philosopher, complicating her picture of the
issues involved in a given ethical problem.
The moral philosophers’ turn to literature has been a central means for
real, contingent, historical morality to enter philosophy, both in the sense
that attention to a literary work prompts the philosopher to think about the
life world of the characters as well as his or her own world, and in the sense
that it has provided a way to verbalize what is particular, contingent, and
concrete. But it has mainly, in the analytic discussion, been used in ways
which do not primarily point in a direction of a descriptive take on ethics.
Nussbaum consistently uses literary works to argue a specific normative
point of view which she terms Aristotelian. This point of view includes the
moral importance of perceptiveness and the imagination, attention to the
situatedness and the practical possibilities for thought and action of human
individuals, and the importance of liberal arts education for the making of a
just society. A lively engagement with real-life moralities is here distinctively
a means to articulate an ideal. In Nussbaum’s case, the result is a body of
work in normative ethics and political philosophy, not in descriptive ethics.
It can thus be easily organized under the large umbrella of academic moral
philosophy, emphasizing the normative points and downplaying the
descriptive contributions. It does not prompt to further inquiry into what
we are or what we have become, but rather to corrective action.
3.3 MORAL HISTORIES

The vast majority of contemporary analytic moral philosophers are
involved in what could be characterized as an ahistorical project: that
of revealing what they take to be the fundamental structure or nature
of morality or moral language. Yet a handful of the frontline figures in
late twentieth century and contemporary analytic philosophy, like
Charles Taylor (1989), Alasdair McIntyre (1967, 1981), Bernard

Williams (1993), and Ian Hacking (1995), have engaged in a kind of
moral history which places the philosophical illumination of morality in
a context of historically contingent moral understandings. I am prob-
ably not the only one to remember my early encounters with
McIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics and After Virtue as significant
experiences. He displayed such variety, not only in theories of moral-
ity, but in what morality has been for people at different times. Are his
narratives correct? I did not know. The details were surely less impor-
tant for late-twentieth-century ethics than the insight that variety in
human morals is not merely variety in opinions or beliefs, but variety
in the very concepts by which people organize their thinking in terms
of good and bad or good and evil. (This insight was not an obvious
part of the roughly analytic curriculum in moral philosophy.)
In contemporary ethics the interest in historical variety has three nota-
ble sources: neo-Hegelianism (as represented by Taylor, Robert Pippin),
the influence of Foucault (Hacking, Nikolas Rose), and the discrepancy
between ancient and modern conceptions of ethics rediscovered with the
broad return of Aristotelian ethics (Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot,
MacIntyre, Nussbaum, etc.). Furthermore, history of ideas, mental his-
tory, and conceptual history are thriving intellectual endeavors today and
great sources for reflection about morality, although not within philoso-
phy departments. There are innumerable ways in which this work can
matter for both normative ethics and metaethics. Most of the philosophers
involved in moral history of these kinds have indeed had both normative
and metaethical interests and aims beyond their purely historical ones, and
use the historical insights to gain perspective on the variety of historically
contingent beliefs and concepts that have formed their own ideas of
morality.
Thus we see in this late-twentieth-century interest in moral history an
important site for the development of a philosophical and yet descriptive
take on ethics, which I will return to later when discussing Foucault and
Taylor. This strand of philosophy does not in itself close the door on a
richly descriptive ethics, but attempts rather to open it. But the philoso-
phical career of this historicist strand in analytic philosophy has been
arrested by the unbridged and apparently unbridgeable gap between uni-
versalist moral theory and historically oriented writings in this tradition.
Historical sensibility, and the awareness that we are, in some sense, radi-
cally situated in time and contingency, is bracketed out from the pursuits
of metaethics and moral theory, which are developed in a universalist and

objectivist spirit. Moral history and historicist moral philosophy are con-
tained and rendered harmless by an accelerating academic specialization,
which makes it easy for moral theorists to ignore insights derived from
historically oriented discussions.
3.4 EXPERIMENTAL AND EMPIRICAL ETHICS

A curious, contested, and often utterly puzzling source of knowledge
about morals is the empirical research conducted in various fields to
figure out things about people’s moral beliefs and reactions. Empirical
research into morals comes in many varieties. Some of these are gathered
under the umbrella term of “experimental philosophy” or “x-phi,” which
is a currently growing field of studies utilizing methods of cognitive
psychology and the social sciences (questionnaires, brain scans, etc.) to
elicit information about people’s moral behavior, moral intuitions, and
intuitions concerning the use of morally charged terms. These kinds of
inquiries may give quite surprising results and be helpful for questioning
the validity of philosophical armchair assumptions concerning human
behavior.
A slightly different type of research utilizes the methods of the social
sciences to elicit knowledge about moral behavior. Take for example a
study that purports to show that well-off people are more prone to
behavior that is considered immoral in their societies (theft, drunk driving,
tax fraud) than people who are socioeconomically less well off (Piff et al.
2012). This can be seen as politically funny because it so starkly goes
against the association of good social standing with moral superiority that
is such an important though often tacit part of contemporary neoliberal
rhetoric. (We are rich because we are excellent and hardworking; you are
poor because you are bad and lazy.) It is also interesting because it may
reveal aspects of the interconnection between morality and relative power,
at least in the investigated social setting.
There is room for a certain worry that the relatively high status of
empirical research today, as compared to the philosophers’ armchair
work, may produce the impression, in some quarters, that these kinds of
empirical “results” can yield moral philosophical insight without the
involvement of actual moral philosophy (whether this “philosophy” is
done by philosophers or others). This, of course, can be a problem.
There is little point in doing complex empirical research into moral
reactions or behavior if we use it to jump to crude normative conclusions.

“Translating” empirical work to normative or metaethical conclusions is
moral philosophy in its own right, and the difficulty of this task should not
be underestimated.
But there should be no reason for moral philosophers to ignore empiri-
cal research, on the pretext, for example, that philosophy is a conceptual
endeavor or that philosophers are looking for universal principles rather
than contingent facts. Kwame Anthony Appiah (2008) defends experi-
ments in ethics by noting that “‘Experimental philosophy,’ rather than
being something new, is as old as the term ‘philosophy.’ The common-
place I want to challenge is that philosophy, in having relinquished those
inquiries that now belong to the physical and social sciences, has somehow
become purely itself” (2008, p. 2). Appiah argues that experimental and
empirical methods have been excluded from moral philosophy proper
through a revisionist historiography, which projects the current idea of
moral philosophy (as a conceptual/theoretical endeavor) onto a past
where it did not exist as such, but was rather one aspect of the “moral
sciences.” Thus x-phi and empirical research into ethics is not external to
philosophy and the apparent radicalism of x-phi is merely due to a very
short memory and very recent habits of philosophizing.
Since x-phi is currently the most active contender to the mainstream
paradigm of analytic ethics, I will look more closely at it in Chap. 5.
Although I am sympathetic to the use of experimental and empirical
methods, I argue that the framework of x-phi is too close to some basic
assumptions of analytic ethics to offer a radical alternative to current moral
theory or to produce a satisfactory, empirically sensitive approach to our
moral forms of life.
3.5 CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES AND CASES

Last, a kind of real-life input to moral philosophy can be seen in the selection
of “hard cases” for moral theory that are discussed in contemporary philo-
sophical debates. Stem-cell research, global warming, a globalized economy,
and so on produce a plethora of moral issues that need to be incorporated
into the framework of any moral theory. In these discussions some of the
problems presented are genuinely new, in the sense that the phenomena
involved have not existed before. Others are brought to the philosopher’s
attention through new or intensified social and political worries. But the
focus in these discussions is not on the evolving sensibilities and concepts
that guide and form our responses to new issues, but rather on the incor-
poration of novel and evolving phenomena into theoretical frameworks that
aspire to universality. This kind of inquiry into hard cases can be thoroughly
ahistorical and thus, in a deeper sense, unconcerned with the nature of our
moral present. Unlike philosophical attention to literature, moral history, or
moral psychology, it does not strive to find out things about ourselves or our
time, but rather seeks solutions to new ethical problems in the inherently
ahistorical resources of moral theory and applied ethics.
A context where philosophers encounter real-life hard cases is formed
by the plethora of multi-professional ethics panels hosted by hospitals,
research institutes, and government bodies that deal with ethically
charged decision making. The work of such organs can never be plainly
the application of intricate moral theory to practice, but is rather con-
stituted by a complex negotiation of experiential, empirical, clinical,
theoretical, and moral concerns. For the professional moral philosopher
these offer practical sites for cultural negotiation and for the confronta-
tion of the philosopher’s toolkit with a complex, imperfect, and chan-
ging practical world. For individual philosophers participation in such
contexts may be of crucial intellectual importance, also concerning how
they see their own more theoretical endeavors. But this kind of practical
service does not at least currently (or not yet) seem to have far-reaching
consequences for how the theoretical pursuits of moral philosophers
develop.
3.6 THE TEXTURE OF OUR MORAL LIVES

It may seem like this list of ways in which real life enters philosophy would
undermine my initial claim that the channels between real life and moral
philosophy are too narrow. Have I not just given examples of widespread
practices and growing discussions that can be tapped for the use of moral
philosophy?
My suggestion is no. In order to make full use of the intellectual
resources at our disposal, moral philosophers should give even more
prominence to the old empiricist virtue of “taking a look.” This can be
done in innumerable ways. Although Anglophone, broadly analytic moral
philosophers have in the past few decades become increasingly curious
about history, literature, and empirical research, they still have a strong
propensity to listen above all to each other. The trajectory of moral
philosophy, in the analytic perspective, follows the achievements of
individual philosophers from Plato through Kant to Moore and, say,

Anscombe, extended with the achievements of some particularly worthy
novelists. This is the kind of thinking that is bound to hide from us the
reality of moral thought in our time and thus also deprive us of a thorough
understanding of the driving forces, pressures, and often surprising origins
of the very best and most worthy manifestations of contemporary moral
thinking and practice. A sustained and original attention to things like
these is one of Foucault’s central contributions to contemporary thought.
As Ian Hacking formulates it: “systems of thought are both anonymous
and autonomous. They are not to be studied by reading the final reports of
the heroes of science, but rather by surveying a vast terrain of discourse
that includes tentative starts, wordy prolegomena, brief flysheets, and
occasional journalism” (Hacking 2004, p. 90). Along these lines, the
“system” of modern moral thought is not best studied by attending to
what we take to be its philosophical high points, but by looking at the
whole framework, society, where these high points present themselves.
Moral intuitions are undoubtedly important, but they give as such
little clue about the various things that cooperate to produce them:
nature, nurture, and all the things we may call culture. Narrative art is
a central source for understanding the moral pressures and negotia-
tions of a given time (the bourgeois novel of the nineteenth century,
the witness literature of the twentieth century, etc.) but it is just one
such source among many others. Moral history is likely to teach us
quite a bit about our own time, but it does not focalize the processes
and negotiations that form our present, nor does it give a clear idea of
how to work on the present. Empirical research gives bits and pieces of
“information” about the present, but does not as such give an under-
standing of the moral forces and pressures at work in our everyday
doings and sayings.
All of these are important but insufficient for the kind of reflective
self-scrutiny and understanding of the present that is necessary for a
moral philosophy worth the name. We need ways of talking about and
analyzing the everyday making of our moral frameworks through quo-
tidian doings and sayings, and how these doings and sayings change.
These are issues that are constantly left out of contemporary analytic
moral philosophy, although they are central in contemporary sociol-
ogy, anthropology, social history, cultural studies, literary criticism and
theory, and so on. Rather than working in the direction of increasing
academic compartmentalization we need to learn from neighboring
fields and traditions and use that learning in philosophically productive

ways. If not, professional moral philosophy has little chance of being
the most acute moral thought of our time. Morally and socially curious
students are advised to turn elsewhere to feed their understanding.
So what am I suggesting? Not a specific methodological extension to
current philosophical practice, but rather an engagement on the behalf of
moral philosophers in the ongoing discovery of the moral present: its
varieties of dominant and subsidiary norms, values, practices, and con-
cepts. Only in this way can we learn to know ourselves and the evaluative
frameworks that covertly form our work in moral philosophy.
One way of doing this is by attending to texts where our evaluations
and moral beliefs are negotiated. Moral discourse (an aspect of moral
practice that can easily be tapped for the use of philosophers) is every-
where, but it is to be found in some places more poignantly than in
others. We can begin with texts that often strike us (or some of us) as
nauseatingly normative: commercials, women’s magazines, self-help lit-
erature, the APA manual, parenting guides, relationship guides, and
popular film. “Texts” of these kinds exhibit our normative hierarchies
and our conceptual frameworks in ways that we in our everyday lives are
already culturally habituated to analyzing and criticizing. A contempor-
ary 7-year-old can produce a competent criticism of a tooth paste
commercial; an 11-year-old can analyze the normative implications of
a science fiction movie. Most grown-up academic philosophers have the
same basic critical skills and use them with discernment in their private
and social contexts—when discussing movies or politicians—but they are
not used to exercising them within the framework of professional moral
philosophy. What we need is to activate our capacity of cultural criticism
in moral philosophy, by attending to a broader range of cultural materi-
als. When attempting to approach various kinds of normative texts the
moral philosophers need not start from scratch, since there is a lot
written about such texts in other disciplines. What we philosophers
need to do, though, is to figure out how such texts—and the knowledge
about ourselves and our societies they open up—matter, in different
cases, for the more specific pursuits of moral philosophy. Since the
philosophers’ questions and concerns are different from the sociologists,
for example, it should be likely that the outcomes of their inquiries are
different too. But I will not here attempt to pin down what philoso-
phers should or could do in this respect, because philosophers are quite
different from each other and have quite different concerns that they
bring to bear on their use of these materials.
The considerations I raise in this book aim at negotiating a place for
these kinds of studies in contemporary moral philosophy. What I endeavor
here is thus not quite the hands-on study of cultural artefacts that is called
for, but rather something more preliminary and traditionally philosophi-
cal: to trace in twentieth-century philosophy a parallel tradition of ethical
thought, which provides some points of orientation for the philosophers’
work in descriptive ethics, a tradition in which description (in many forms)
takes precedence over normativity, theory, and systematization.
NOTES
1. For discussions of Benatar’s book, see Pihlström (2011) and Forsberg
(2013).
2. See, for example, Avner Baz (2012); to remind us that this is not a new
discussion, see also Dewey and Tufts (1932).
CHAPTER 4
The Foundational Project of Ethics

and a Different Way of Going
Below the Surface
Abstract Modern moral philosophy has generally organized its inquiries

around two core subjects: 1) normative ethics or ethical theory, concerned
with the good and the right, and 2) metaethics, concerned with the
meaning, role and status of moral language and moral judgements.
These are the central nodes to which other approaches to ethics and
other areas of moral inquiry are appended, but they constitute only a
part of moral philosophy. To rethink this mode of organizing the field
Hämäläinen identifies two distinct strands in modern moral philosophy.
First, there is a main stream which follows the division of labor between
metaethics and normative ethics, and which generally holds that the for-
mer should provide ideas concerning the nature and status of morals and
the latter should provide rational grounding of morals along with action
guidance. Second, there is a strand of moral philosophy which gives
priority to the description of our moral lives, moral practices, historically
contingent norms, ideas and habits.
Keyword Normative ethics Metaethics
It can now be argued that the apparent patchiness of the moral philo-
sopher’s access to moral life is produced here through a highly tenden-
tious and rather perverse coup. Only by looking at moral philosophy
from a perspective quite foreign to its own practices, that is, from a

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_4
cultural/historical/sociological/descriptive point of view, do we arrive

at the impression of patchiness in its command of the moral life.
Moral philosophy is of course assembled in a completely different
way: The principles according to which it is put together are not those
of a cartographic or culturally explorative study. Modern moral philo-
sophy, especially in the Anglophone setting, has generally, as we know,
organized its inquiries around two core subjects: (1) normative ethics or
ethical theory, concerned with the good and the right, and (2)
metaethics, concerned with the meaning, role, and status of moral
language and moral judgments. These are the central nodes to which
other approaches to ethics and other areas of moral inquiry are appended,
and this mode of organization affects how we conceptualize these
philosophical others. Thus, applied ethics is the application of theory to
life; narrative literature is a companion to moral theory, helping us to
formulate theories that are more sensitive to real life; the history of ethics
is a series of past “theories” in the modern sense; x-phi is a means for
formulating moral or metaethical theories that better match our real
moral psychology; and so on.
But the crucial point here is precisely that the way in which moral
philosophy is composed, around normativity and ontology, is not a self-
evident reflection of what morality is like. It is rather a historically formed
constellation that might become an obstacle to many kinds of fruitful
research and vital insight. The obstacle to knowing things about morality
lies in the things moral philosophers do seek to figure out and in the ways
their emphases shape the field. What we have here is a special case of a
perennial problem, which could be formulated as follows: Even the most
useful theory, intellectual framework, and vocabulary comes at a cost—the
temporal loss of other ways of looking offered by other theories, intellec-
tual frameworks, and vocabularies.
There are always specific kinds of sophistication to be won through
fidelity to a theory or framework. But in order to know one’s subject matter
thoroughly (at least in philosophy and the human and social sciences), one
often needs to move outside one’s habitual theoretical framework and
look at it critically. Indeed, it often is the case that one has to move outside
one’s framework in order to know the framework itself: its strengths as
well as its limitations. What does the framework do to us and for us? Are
the gains worth the losses?
A. J. Ayer thought, in the spirit of early analytic philosophy, that
theorizing about good and evil would not have a place in a modern
4 FOUNDATIONAL PROJECT OF ETHICS AND DIFFERENT WAY OF GOING 29
philosophy. “A strictly philosophical treatise on ethics should . . . make no

ethical pronouncements. But it should, by giving an analysis of ethical
terms, show what is the category to which all such pronouncements
belong” (Ayer 1952, pp. 103–104). But this opinion, relegating the role
of ethics in philosophy to a question of the nature of ethical language, was,
though influential in its time, a fairly brief vogue. Normative ethics has, in
its own way, been thriving in late twentieth century and contemporary
philosophy and constitutes today the body of moral philosophy, with
metaethics as an ancillary discipline where a certain conceptual ground-
work is done. Thus I will here be concerned with how normative ethics
assembles the field of moral philosophy, because this is the assemblage that
sets the tacit methodological framework that most moral philosophers
today have to work within.
Let us look more closely at two central characteristics of modern
moral theory or normative ethics. These are (1) modern moral phi-
losophy’s distinctive ambition to provide rational grounds for moral
reasoning and action, and (2) the conjoined idea that the discovery of
rational grounds will have normative implications, that is, be properly
and duly action guiding. Although these two ideas do not define
what a philosophical ethics can be in the analytic tradition, they
cause moral philosophy to gravitate in a direction where the various
descriptive projects appear incomprehensible or subsidiary. If we seek
for rational grounds and a constitutive normative account in this
manner, then the various real-life moralities are bound to look like
imperfect (or mistaken) attempts to realize an ideal universal order.
This mode of thinking is a central part of the Western philosophical
tradition from Plato, and it has a tremendous capacity to mutate to fit
local conditions. Most analytic philosophers today would have trou-
ble accepting the idea of the real, true, or good as being something
above and beyond the reality of our lives together, but they never-
theless (and inadvertently) accept a low-key variety of the Platonic
move, in the conviction that the rationality of moral thought must be
secured by an explanatory, sufficiently simple, normative theoretical
account.
The search for rational grounds does not necessarily imply foundation-
alism, that is, the bringing back of moral rationality to some singular
founding principle. It can in fact appear in a large variety of forms, many
of which present themselves as anti-foundationalist. As Nussbaum formu-
lates the ambition of moral theory:
The ethical theorist claims that an ethical theory gives important guidelines
for ethical practice and a set of guidelines for the proper use of rules, by
sorting out the material of conduct in a more explicit and perspicuous way,
giving the point and purpose of maxims of various types, and providing an
account of human psychology that will both direct programmes of moral
education and show when basically appropriate conduct is or is not fully
virtuous. (Nussbaum 2000, p. 241)
Nussbaum quite explicitly does not seek a singular foundation of morals,

but rather a kind of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium. Defining of the idea of
reflective equilibrium is the balancing of various concerns to elicit the best
theoretical account, all things considered. This balanced account then
takes the place of a foundation for a rational morality and provides the
basis for extensive normative programs in different areas of life. As a result,
Nussbaum’s account is heavily theoretical: not in the sense that it would
provide many new theoretical concepts or tools, but rather in the sense
that all aspects of the moral life and moral philosophy are articulated in
relation to her neo-Aristotelian and liberal theoretical core. Theory,
furthermore, is not just a way of looking, but a way of securing.
Nick Fotion (2014), in his book on the nature of moral theory,
describes the moral philosopher’s search for grounding in terms of taking
moral reflection to a “critical level of thinking.” We should dwell here for a
moment on what this means. He leans here on R. M. Hare’s (1981)
distinction between intuitive moral judgments and moral judgments that
have been tried (for their coherence, consistency, etc.) in philosophy: a
distinction which, he notes, has a long history. As Fotion puts it: “it is
the contrast between critical and non-critical thinking that is important.
The former involves assessment of the ethics of a situation, the latter its
acceptance” (2014, p. 30). By “the ethics of the situation,” Fotion means
something like the habitual, immediate, or intuitive ethical judgment in a
concrete case. Critical thinking thus means a reflective assessment of moral
judgment, for example, assessment of the criteria by which one makes
moral judgments in a given situation or an assessment of the applicability
of a moral concept to a situation. Obviously we do not constantly assess
our criteria for judgment, but rely on habit as well as previous reflective
assessments. Drawing on Hare, Fotion suggests that the special task of
philosophy in relation to ethics is to transport our moral judgments to the
“critical level.” This could in principle be done by means of moral theory
or in some other way: “for now, critical thinking will be treated as an open
concept. I am assuming that we could engage in critical thinking using

utilitarian theory, to be sure, but also, possibly, by using Kantian, natural
law, contract, or any other theory instead. But, in addition, for now I am
assuming that any of us could engage in critical thinking without appeal-
ing to any theory at all” (2014, p. 29).
A generous admission, it may seem, in the direction of nontheoretical
thinking, but in fact Fotion’s whole discussion leans on the assumption
that moral theories (of a more or less contemporary analytic kind, com-
plemented by Habermas) are an essential component in critical moral
thinking. Theories, for Fotion, are entities that fulfill a specifiable list of
criteria: They provide justification of moral norms, they offer a procedure
for the generation of norms, they are universalizable, and they organize
norms under a limited set of headings. (We may here leave aside the fact
that Fotion pictures himself as providing a more relaxed idea of theory
than what is habitual in analytic moral theory.) Theoretical accounts which
do not follow the specified criteria are not candidates for taking ethical
thought to a critical level. In practice, this means that thinkers like, say,
Simone Weil, Soren Kierkegaard, or Michel Foucault would not take our
reflection to a critical level of thinking, unless, of course, someone comes
up with an idea of how to transform their thinking into an apparatus of
theorized action guidance.
All in all, our capacity to relate reflectively and critically to our moral
beliefs and judgments is pictured, by both Nussbaum and Fotion, as
dependent on a quite specific type of cultural artifacts that are distinctive
to modern moral philosophy specifically and the Western philosophical
tradition more generally. Nussbaum traces the emergence of these arti-
facts and the practices related to them to Plato and Aristotle, making a
sharp distinction between these beacons of the light of reason on the one
hand and other “philosophical” schools of antiquity, where obedience
and the adoption of a given way of life were emphasized (Nussbaum,
1994).1 Fotion does not make distinctive historical claims but assumes
more or less that the pursuits of Kant and Mill were comparable to the
pursuits of contemporary moral theorists in all central respects. This is
something of a standard approach to the history of moral philosophy in
contemporary ethics. The classics are admired for originality of vision
and wide-ranging concerns, while modern varieties of deontology and
consequentialism are seen as developments, purifications, clarifications,
and systematizations—in short improvements—to the views presented
by the classics.
Both Fotion and Nussbaum, neither of whom is a “foundationalist,”

believe that critical thinking in ethics, in contrast to unreflective accep-
tance of the given, centrally involves the systematized (theoretical)
presentation of “rational” grounds for why certain principles or ideals
should be accepted. For both of them, any inquiry into our moral forms
of life, no matter how important in its own right, is from a philosophical
point of view ancillary or preparatory to such founding/normative project.
Because of this, both fail, in a manner characteristic of present-day analytic
ethics, to see the critical intent and potential in moral philosophical
projects that reject the philosophical search for rational grounds and
interrogate the form and nature of our moral lives in other ways.
Something to pay attention to in this picture of critical thinking and
rationality is how particular and rather technical it is. Beginning with a
commonsense notion of critical thinking as the thoughtful questioning of
the given, it soon evolves into a quite specific procedure, intimately tied to
contemporary moral theory. That critical thinking in the everyday sense
can be expressed in narrative, visual art, dance, practices of consumption,
gestures, refusals, or indeed other kinds of philosophical thought is
bypassed, and the idea of critical thought is sold back to us in a two-for-
the-price-of-one package with moral theory. But there is no intentional
deceitfulness in this procedure: It is how things look for many people from
the inside of analytic moral theory. (I have a memory of seeing moral
thought from this perspective too, as a student. This is what the textbooks
let us think.)
It should be emphasized, though, that neither the grounding role nor the
normative role of philosophy is unanimously embraced by analytic philoso-
phers. Many analytic philosophers, especially of the mid-twentieth century,
were rather skeptical concerning the normative implications and reformative
potentials of moral philosophy (like Ayer 1952) and saw the role of philo-
sophy mainly in theoretical elucidation. Many of these skeptics have done
their work in metaethics, elucidating the status and nature of moral utter-
ances and judgments. But metaethics too is constitutively uninterested in the
contents of our contingent moral situations, practices, and lives.
For heuristic purposes, although this by necessity involves simplifica-
tions, I suggest that we identify two distinct strands in modern moral
philosophy. First, there is a mainstream which follows the division of labor
between metaethics and normative ethics, and which generally holds that
the former should provide ideas concerning the nature and status of
morals and the latter should provide rational grounding of morals along
with action guidance. To these philosophers the contingent facts of our

moral lives mostly appear as in plain sight, and the main tasks of the
philosophers lie in metaethical theory or in normative theory as roughly
outlined by Fotion.
Second, there is a strand of moral philosophy which gives priority to the
description of our moral lives, moral practices, historically contingent
norms, ideas, and habits. What is distinctive to the latter group of philo-
sophers is that they find, in the very facts of our moral lives—habits, ideals,
practices, norm-systems, language—a vast area of unclarity that prompts
continuous inquiry. In their view, our moral lives are not transparent to
ourselves, and the challenge of moral philosophy is to achieve cultural self-
understanding.
The distinction is not one between philosophers who ascribe nor-
mative or meliorist aims to philosophy versus those who refrain from
normative aims to the benefit of pure detached description. I do not
assume that there is such a thing as pure detached description in ethics,
because all kinds of metaethical and meta-philosophical commitments
have evaluative and normative aspects, dimensions, or consequences.
Furthermore, many of the philosophers of the descriptive strand have
quite distinctly normative moral aims. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard can
be counted into the descriptive strand due to their efforts to uncover
aspects of our historically contingent ways of life that may be difficult
to perceive, notwithstanding the fact that both are distinctly moralists.
Dewey’s work is thoroughly illuminated by his meliorism. Foucault’s
persistence in noncommittal archeology and genealogy is just one side
of an oeuvre that is driven by a deep moral concern with the question
of human freedom and the possibilities for liberation and transcen-
dence. Taylor sets as his explicit task the defence of certain aspects of
the modern moral framework. Murdoch’s broad cultural investigations
into modern moral life are accompanied by a normative “ethics of
attention.”
In a like manner, philosophers of the mainstream of analytic ethics can
either have or not have normative or meliorist aims with their work. Some
have great doubts about the possibilities for philosophy to offer action-
guidance, while others, like Nussbaum, think that the central task of moral
philosophy is indeed to make a better world. Many of the dominant
English-language philosophers of the mid-twentieth century were con-
vinced that philosophy properly should confine its role to conceptual
elucidation and this is still a viable position among philosophers whose
main concerns lie within metaethics. Modern normative ethics, to the

contrary, is mostly guided by the idea that moral philosophy can and
should make an intervention into our moral life. The tasks of systematizing
moral thought and seeking “rational grounds” for our moral understand-
ing (described above) are seen as parts of an important real-life task of
improving our moral lives.
Thus, although the descriptive project of moral philosophy is some-
times framed as normatively noncommittal, in contrast to mainstream
ethics, I want to emphasize that this is misleading, concerning both
descriptive ethics and mainstream ethics. But it is important to pay atten-
tion to how the ways of making normative commitments in descriptively
focused accounts differ from ditto in mainstream ethics. I will return to
this issue in due course.
The moral philosophers’ novel turn to virtues, character, and person-
hood from the mid-twentieth century on has opened up for a broader
descriptive take on the moral life in analytic ethics. We see this in the
work of people like Murdoch, Williams, Taylor, MacIntyre, Nussbaum,
and their followers. But if we follow the heuristic division above between
a moral philosophy which seeks understanding through description and a
moral philosophy which seeks rational grounding, we may note that the
ethical turn toward virtue and character is divided between these modes or
directions of philosophy. The most part of what goes under the label of
virtue ethics in the broadly analytic context today is of the latter kind,
building a normative theory of morals on virtues rather than norms, duties,
rights, or the like. Rosalind Hursthouse and Michael Slote belong to this
type, and it would, I think, be reasonable to count Philippa Foot to them
too. Common to many of these philosophers in the present context is that
they consider virtue ethics a viable alternative to utilitarian, deontological,
and contractarian normative theories in ethics and do not express a radical
dissatisfaction with the way the nature and role of moral philosophy is
understood in mainstream analytic ethics.
By and large, it seems like those who have turned their interest in
the virtues into a theory that can be read as offering rational grounds
for moral conduct have been taken to represent what virtue ethics is
essentially about in analytic moral philosophy. The moral philosophers
for whom the descriptive project has been more central, and who have
not sought to articulate an atemporal foundation and normative frame-
work, have to a certain extent been misrepresented in, or excluded from,
the debate. Among the somewhat misrepresented we find Murdoch
and Taylor, whose overall work has a more prominent descriptive emphasis
and whose ideas of the relationship between philosophical work and norma-
tivity are quite different. I will return to the case of Taylor in Chap. 9.
NOTE
1. This separation does not in Nussbaum’s case mean that the other philoso-
phical schools would be completely discarded. On the contrary, she is
sympathetic to many elements present in the other schools, such as their
thinking about emotions, and draws on them in her formulation of her own
account.
CHAPTER 5
The Challenge from X-phi
Abstract Hämäläinen identifies experimental ethics as a main claimant to

the title of the contemporary descriptive moral philosophy above others.
Reviewing three types of X-phi—the Knobe effect, the trolley cases, and
the coin in the phone booth—she argues that contemporary experimental
ethics is too close to analytic moral theory regarding its terms and pre-
sumptions to be a genuine alternative to mainstream analytic ethics. The
experimental work conducted in this field can, however, contribute impor-
tantly to the formations of a broader descriptive approach to ethics.
Keyword X-phi
As noted before in Chap. 3, the past few decades have seen quite a lot of
activity between moral philosophy and empirical research: The rise of
moral psychology, within philosophy as well as within psychology, at the
end of the twentieth century has provided opportunities for empirical
curiosity in moral philosophy.1 By and large it seems like the reaching
out to empirical study has strengthened the interest in moral emotions and
moral experience, providing these suspiciously ephemeral areas of moral
inquiry with an additional leg to stand on outside philosophy.
There are many reasons to be sympathetic to the opening up toward
various fields of empirical research but, like many others, I am cautious
concerning the occasional attempts, seen in such discussions, to replace

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_5
philosophical reflection with data of one kind or another. I have no quarrel

with empirical research in ethics, but I have central cautions concerning
empirical naivety. Empirical data can have a significant impact on moral
philosophy, for example, by subverting commonly held beliefs about
moral psychology or moral language use. Nonetheless, empirical research
does not translate into philosophy and does not automatically yield
philosophical conclusions on its own, but requires a complex activity of
translation where scientists and philosophers as well as their readers may be
needed as active participants. In this respect philosophy is no different
from other fields where the collection of data about human subjects—their
views, reactions, interrelations or interactions with some environment—
constitutes a part of the scientific/academic work.2
The history and sociology of philosophical research would probably
confirm the impression that the coinage of a concept and the gathering of
a group around it are central for the shaping of thought, regardless of the
innovative nature of the thinking involved. Innovative thinking may pass
unnoticed, if it lacks a striking and memorable concept and a devoted
(or becomingly conflict-ridden) in-group. And conversely, thinking may
gain in appearance of novelty through the presence of these factors. The
contemporary philosophical subfield called experimental philosophy, or
more familiarly, X-phi, has gained from coinage, devotees, and contro-
versy. It feeds on the present sensibility, which I share, that philosophy
should communicate with empirical research on topics that are close to its
concerns. We should certainly not think of this as a novel desire:
Philosophers have at least up to the mid-twentieth century been in intense
exchange with the sciences of their times. This point is helpfully empha-
sized by Anthony Appiah (2008), but often forgotten in the bustle of
actual X-phi research. The ethos of mid-twentieth-century analytic philo-
sophy, assigning to philosophy its own areas of specific expertise in logic
and conceptual analysis, contributed significantly to the still influential
image of philosophers as experts, whose task is to contribute to their
own technically sophisticated internal debates. Furthermore the growth
in numbers of both researchers and research publications has over the past
60 years made it difficult for anyone to keep up a satisfactory level of
expertise even within one’s own field or fields, with the effect that thor-
ough and deep understanding of other fields is increasingly difficult. As a
result, today, the philosopher’s longing for scientific knowledge is not
satisfied through a continuous deep companionship between philosophy
as a field and other fields of moral study, but rather through occasional
5 THE CHALLENGE FROM X-PHI 39
borrowings, interventions, and novel linkages between specific philoso-

phical discussions and equally specific branches of empirical study. X-phi
is no exception in this respect: a fact which its proponents seem to be
quite well aware of. This is how a web page devoted to information and
discussion about X-phi defines the field: “Experimental philosophy,
called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements
the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of
cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run
systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily
think about the issues at the foundations of philosophical discussions”
(http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html).
That is, X-phi is an approach that provides a supplement to the methods
of analytic philosophy from the methods of cognitive science. In practice,
this means that most studies take their idea of the philosophical status quo
from mainstream analytic philosophy and then borrow empirical tools
such as surveys and brain scans (working together with scientists), to test
the credibility and feasibility of philosopher’s armchair assumptions and
conclusions. Typically surveys relevant to ethics are constructed to elicit
informants’ “intuitions” concerning the applicability of a concept in a
given situation, or the rightness or wrongness of a given course of action.
Such studies can offer an extension to the philosopher’s own “intuitions”
about the questions at hand. The notion of “intuition” used is a fairly
casual one, meaning, in practice, merely something like “what people
would say” or “what people think they would say or do.”
I will here provide a brief outline of a paradigmatic X-phi case, the
so-called Knobe effect, in order to demonstrate a few aspects of the
functioning of present-day X-phi (Knobe 2003). As a doctoral student
in philosophy, Joshua Knobe conducted a study on a random sample
of people in a New York park, presenting them with the following
scenario: A vice president of a company presents, to the chairman of
the board, a profitable plan, which he notes will, as a side effect, harm
the environment. They go ahead with the plan and the environment is
harmed. When a random sample of people were asked if this is a case
of harming the environment intentionally, 82 % said it was so. Then
the case was changed so that the vice president says the profitable plan
will have the side effect of helping the environment. They go ahead
with the plan and the environment is helped. When people were asked
if this was a case of helping the environment intentionally only 23 %
said it was so.
This variation seemed to require an explanation. If the harm and benefit

are both knowingly caused (though not for its own sake deliberately
willed) as a consequence of an action which is intentional, then there
should be no difference concerning the intentionality of harming versus
benefiting the environment. And yet people’s linguistic or conceptual
intuitions seem to suggest that there is some difference: The people in
the test applied the word “intentionally” more easily in the case of harm.
Knobe concluded that the informants’ judgments varied with their moral
assessment of the pictured situation. But how could this be and why? A
substantial number of similar tests were conducted by Knobe and others,
altering the example, preselecting the test group in relevant ways, simpli-
fying it to be tested on children, testing on non-Western informants, and
so on. Similar tests were also conducted for concepts like “decided” and
“intentional.” The results are various but the conclusion in most cases has
been that the moral judgment of informants is indeed somehow linked to
variation in their tendency to use morally “neutral” words such as “inten-
tionally” to describe a situation. A range of answers have been offered for
the phenomenon, many of them suggesting that the discrepancy signals
some kind of confusion or emotional reaction on the part of the infor-
mants, distorting the (otherwise straightforward) attribution of intention-
ality. Knobe himself insists on the view that the case actually points to a
fundamental intertwinement of “fact” and “value” in people’s perception
of the world (Knobe 2010).
The main reason for the broad interest in this case is that it goes against
two distinct and central tenets of contemporary analytic philosophy, one to
do with the philosophy of language and the other to do with both episte-
mology and metaphysics. The first one is that a word like “intentionally”
should function the same way in both scenarios (that it is puzzling if it does
not), because “intentionally” means the same thing in both cases, and
people ought to be aware of that. The second tenet is that “moral beliefs”
(it is wrong to harm the environment) should not affect our idea of the
“facts” of the case (e.g., whether x did something intentionally).
But the effect is only strange and potentially disruptive if one has the
analytic philosopher’s preconceptions. An ordinary language philosopher
following Wittgenstein or Austin would be likely to hold that there is
nothing inherently strange about the alteration in the attribution of
intentionality since concepts naturally have this kind of pragmatic fluidity
and “intentionally” is not a transparent label for a singular core meaning.
For this kind of philosopher, attention to this kind of variation is a central
part of the philosopher’s work. The variation is interesting in many ways,

because it can make us aware of aspects of our lives and language that we
may not otherwise pay attention to, and because it may help us overcome
undue philosophical generalizations, for example. But it does not consti-
tute a puzzle that calls for an explanation, if one does not assume a kind of
stable core meaning, independent of pragmatics.
Furthermore a Wittgensteinian, a pragmatist (like Putnam 1981, 2002),
or a moral philosopher inspired by Murdoch would be likely to recognize
the difference in attributions of intentionality as one more example which
highlights the complex relationship between those things that we call facts
and those things that we call values. Murdoch would have insisted that the
description of a human situation, even when it contains no explicitly
evaluative expressions, is shot through with evaluation. (“Life is soaked in
the moral, literature is soaked in the moral” (Murdoch 1997, p. 27).)
I am not reviewing these different perspectives in order to take sides
here, but merely to show that philosophical experiments (and the ways
they are potentially interesting) are relative to and are made sense of in
relation to philosophical assumptions, dogmas, and debates. The results of
the Knobe test would not raise as much interest if it did not thwart
commonly held (philosophical) views. Among ordinary language philoso-
phers, it would sort as a humble exemplar among our attempts to map our
uses of words, and one which more or less confirms what we expected to
hear anyway, pointing toward a conceptual linkage between intentionality
and moral accountability. This does not mean that its philosophical inter-
est would thus be exhausted. Knobe’s (2010) analysis of the conceptual
relations in different tested cases brings interesting insight into the con-
crete functioning of language, which would not have been prompted by a
philosophical perspective where conceptual fluidity and the presence of
value in our descriptions of the world are taken for granted.
The strikingness of the Knobe effect for analytic philosophers lies, how-
ever, in its challenge to a specific framework of philosophical thinking. An
“experiment” like Knobe’s does not lay bare anything general, about our
responses or concepts or intuitions, for example, but works as a kind of local
test of philosophical presupposition, which to its contents is typical, not of
philosophy in general but of a specific kind of philosophy. X-phi of this type
works as a challenge to the style of using intuition in analytic philosophy:
It can show us places where people do not judge, speak, or function the way
analytic philosophers, in their theoretical work, take for granted that “we”
do or should do. It does not as such replace or even add to philosophical
knowledge or insight: It needs to be interpreted, its potential implications

investigated.
Let us take another example. The infamous trolley cases in analytic
ethics operate on the discrepancy between the utilitarian emphasis on
consequences and the deontological emphasis on action in its own
right. The basic form of a trolley case is to imagine a scenario where
a small action (on your own part) can save several people by sacrificing
the life of one person. A trolley, for example, is on a track where it will
hit and kill five people.3 Would it be right to pull a lever which would
steer the trolley onto another track, even if there is a person standing
on that track, who is going to be run over if you do? A utilitarian
perspective would suggest that I should prevent the death of many
even if it would cause the death of one. According to a deontological
view, the causing of the death of another person could not be justified
by saving the many. In psychological tests built on trolley cases respon-
dents are asked if they would think it is right to pull a lever to steer the
trolley onto a track where it will kill one person instead, or would they,
alternatively, see it better to do nothing and let more people die. In a
well-known empirical trolley study people’s measured emotional or
stress reactions (in an fMRI scan) were greater when contemplating
the case of pushing one person to save many—a result which (unsur-
prisingly) suggests a greater instinctive revulsion against doing harm
that is “up close and personal” (Greene et al. 2001).
I am not here interested to ponder over the implications of these kinds
of cases and tests, but rather to point out how such cases are premised on
the specific tensions of contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Foots’
original discussion, from which the trolley cases are derived (although
there are no trolleys in it), was about the doctrine of double effect invoked
by Catholics in the case of abortion. But the large interest in these cases
has to do with the way they match an ethical discussion which (1) is
dominated by utilitarian and deontological ways of conceptualizing
moral action and agency, (2) is uncomfortable with genuine moral dilem-
mas (situations where all options are wrong), and (3) assumes that it is the
task of moral philosophy to provide principled resolutions to questions
like these, by means of a general theory. These presuppositions are indeed
common in contemporary ethics, but not universally shared, and for those
who do not share them the trolley cases may pose no particularly deep
problem and provide no philosophically interesting information, in addi-
tion to the potential role they may have in experimental psychology.
A third, frequently cited type of moral X-phi is represented by studies

where the context sensitivity of people’s moral performance is tested.
(See, e.g., Appiah 2008, pp. 40–41; Upton 2009.) In one subset of
these tests people’s readiness to generous action is tried after they have
(or have not) experienced some minor positive occurrence, for example,
found a coin in the phone booth or, as a comparison, have not found a
coin (Isen and Levin 1972). Experiments of this kind have shown that a
practically insignificant strike of luck to the benefit of themselves can
dispose people to act more altruistically. The interest in cases like this
lies in the way they suggest that our moral agency is extremely context
sensitive. They suggest that things so small that we would rightly regard
them insignificant may alter our moral performance substantially.4 In this
capacity, they work as reminders for anyone who thinks of moral philoso-
phy as concerned with the intentional actions of rational individuals or
with fully stable, acquired character traits. They do not interfere with the
formulation of “worthy ideals,” but help to think about whether our idea
of actual moral agency is realistic. (Can our practical reasoning and moral
action be helped by a philosophy, which assumes that we are something
that we in fact are not?) Thus they do not directly intervene in debates of
normative ethics, but rather help to raise the question of whether moral
philosophy has been concerned with the right things, or rather, a broad
enough range of things. Here the experimental work is not as clearly
geared toward the concerns of analytic philosophy, but aims more gen-
erally at an empirical understanding of what in a broad sense has been
called “moral psychology.” But they are put to work, nonetheless, as local
interventions into what is commonly assumed, also, and centrally, in
analytic moral philosophy.
As paradigmatic cases of X-phi (whether done by philosophers, psy-
chologists, or others), these cases give us an idea of why X-phi cannot be
the sought-for descriptive/empirical counterpoint to the moral philoso-
pher’s search for grounding and normative theories. Insofar as X-phi is
experimental, its mode of functioning is punctual. It provides interven-
tions to help us rethink our broader picture, but it does not produce the
broader picture in its own right. The broader picture is still produced out
of a mixture of new discoveries, everyday taken-for-granted notions (often
called intuitions), and the established presupposition, the common
ground, of academic moral philosophy. (This is the case also when X-phi
researchers move on to flesh out the significance of their findings.) This
broader picture could be likened with a weave to which the experiment
pokes a threatening hole or adds a thread or pattern. The experiments are

tests of the adequacy of the weave. We could not add together the
interventions into a useful picture of moral life: They require a framework
of understanding against which the experiments work as confirmations or
challenges.
We could imagine that understanding in experimental ethics would
emerge through a kind of hypothetical deductive method. Our moral
and moral philosophical preconceptions would function as hypotheses
which are tested through the experiments. But the idea of a hypothesis is
not quite right, either for our casual moral beliefs, “intuitions,” and
precepts or for the ones presented by moral theory. Or perhaps it would
be more apt to say that moral and moral philosophical ideas and concep-
tions are only rarely hypothetical, and the articulation of such ideas is only
rarely the presentation of a hypothesis. They may be formulated with the
awareness that they are fallible and potentially incomplete, but they are not
formulated hypothetically, in order to be tested. Formulations of moral
and moral philosophical belief and conviction are rather attempts to
articulate a moral point of view; formulations of moral philosophy are
attempts to provide, in some of the philosopher’s available styles, an idea
about the nature and coherence of morality. When moral theories are
staged in opposition to one another in a philosophical debate, they pro-
vide alternative and competing ways of looking at morality, different ways
of valuing, different ways of articulating human agency, responsibility, and
the role of chance in human affairs. Way may introduce to this procedure
an element of hypothesis: We do allow that certain empirical considera-
tions, certain experimental results, certain pieces of knowledge, for exam-
ple, about what we call moral psychology, should reasonably affect the
constitution of our theory. But there is no clear procedure for how this
effect is to come about. Moral outlooks and moral theories are not
abandoned in favor of another hypothetical view, because of empirical
evidence or experimental results. Such results are rather added to the many
things that contribute to the sometimes slow and sometimes relatively
quick course of reconceptualization and change in moral and moral phi-
losophical thinking.
X-phi provides a range of ways of gaining empirical insight into
philosophically challenging questions. But it does so always in relation to
a given framework of thinking, both theoretical and quotidian. Insofar
as it grows out of the soil of analytic philosophy, it tends to remain within
the philosophical universe of analytic philosophy. Its task becomes,
inadvertently, to illuminate the world shown to us through the lens of

analytic ethics.
In the search for a broad descriptive empirically curious ethics, X-phi
cannot be the answer because it is, as it stands, premised on analytic
moral philosophy, its theoretical presuppositions, the divide between
normative ethics and metaethics. We do not here seek an analytic philo-
sophy modified by frequent experimental reality checks. What we need is
a study of morality which is empirical, conceptual, and historical: sensi-
tive to input from neighboring fields of inquiry, from life and from art,
seeking to know all sorts of things about morality and letting these things
affect what one may have to say. The methods of X-phi can, and should,
surely be a part of this—but only a part.
What I suggest is a completely different take on what an empirically
informed moral philosophy would be. Instead of combining the concerns
of analytic ethics with experimental and other empirical methods, I take
a step backwards to gain a more perspicuous view. And there, indeed, we
have, within twentieth-century philosophy a number of prominent thinkers,
whose central concerns have not been the grounds of normative judgments,
the (general) meaning of moral language, or the metaphysics of morality,
but rather our complex forms of life, of which ethics forms a part.
I have thus far sketched out a rough picture of contemporary
Anglophone moral philosophy: what it does, what it does not do, its
center and peripheries, as well as its main internal contenders. I now
turn to elucidating a take on moral philosophy where different descriptive
endeavors, seeking to know more about our moral forms of life, are central
rather than peripheral to moral philosophy. My aim in the following
chapters is not to present new readings of the works of the four central
philosophers of this book. All such things must lie outside the scope of this
text. I intend merely to sketch out as much of their overall direction of
inquiry and central concerns as is necessary to show how they make
irreducible, heterogeneous, and original contributions to the larger
project of an ethics which takes the very substance of our historically
contingent moral lives to be the central concern of moral philosophy.
My mode of reading is fairly personal, in the sense that I trace in the
work of these philosophers some central things that I have learned from
them. I have no ambition to do new scholarship here: merely to put my
readings of these philosophers to work for a descriptive moral philosophy.
Dewey stands here for the attempt to shift focus, in moral philosophy
and the theory of value, from an abstract study of value to an empirical
study of practices of valuation. Wittgenstein stands for a low-key, non-

empirical, conceptual attention to our moral practices. Between these we
have the probing question of the roles of empirical study versus conceptual
investigation in philosophy. Foucault and Taylor both stand for deep engage-
ment with the historicity of morals. Foucault’s primary interest is the
rootedness of conceptualization, value and belief in the practices and insti-
tutions that shape our day-to-day lives. Taylor’s emphasis is more on the
development of Western thought in its own right and how it has come to
shape our everyday lives. More importantly, for present purposes, where
Foucault seeks as far as possible a morally noncommittal posture in relation
to his analyses, Taylor regards the affirmative articulation of a moral point of
view as a central part of the philosopher’s task, and the noncommittal
posture of Foucault as self-defeating. Between these, thus, we have the
question of the role of normativity in a broadly descriptive account of ethics.
Something that all of these four philosophers contribute to, in their
different ways, is the attempt to understand our own historically formed
moral and evaluative way of life, our moral present, and the various ways in
which it is rooted in our social, linguistic, material, and institutional
conditions. Perhaps this could be considered as a rough, preliminary idea
of, if not the, then at least a special characteristic of philosophers in the
realm of descriptive ethics. For social scientists, anthropologists, and
historians the group or phenomenon studied is often one of which the
researcher is not a part. Obviously there are exceptions to this: Swedish
fathers studying contemporary Swedish fatherhood or Western white
middle-class professors studying the income distribution effects of govern-
ment austerity measures. But the results of these studies should not
optimally depend on one’s own involvement.
For the philosopher the situation is different. The philosophical study
of the moral present is a study of the philosopher’s self, how he sees things,
and how he could see differently. Historical and comparative attempts too,
insofar as they are philosophical, contain this aspect of intervention into
one’s own framework of beliefs, concepts, ideas, ideals, hopes, dreams,
and projections.
Moral theory standardly aims at something atemporal. Descriptive
ethics in the realm of philosophy aims at uncovering, making visible,
the structure and nature of what we, quite contingently, are and do.
How does it differ from what social scientists do in their reflective
mood? In much social science there is quite a bit of philosophy in the
sense of self-reflective work on one’s background assumptions, beliefs, and
concepts. Calling it philosophy is not so much an attempt to appropriate it

from the social scientists and others, but rather to mark it as something
that philosophers should above all be concerned with.
NOTES
1. For two helpful collected volumes of articles in the burgeoning field of
experimental philosophy, see Knobe and Nichols (2008), (2014). Also
see Appiah (2008); Luetge et al. (2014) for discussions on experimental
ethics.
2. The domestication of empirical data into moral philosophy is an interesting
issue in its own right, both empirically—how and when has this happened—
and philosophically—how should we conceptualize and assess such occur-
rences from the point of view of our philosophical understanding. These
complicated processes would be a fit object for research, for example, in the
realm of science and technology studies.
3. For the original formulation see Foot, 1978 (originally published in the
Oxford Review, no. 5, 1967). The trolley cases have been developed among
others by Judith Jarvis Thomson (1976) and Peter Unger (1996).
4. In the wake of the virtue ethics boom in the 1990s, cases like these were held
up to challenge virtue ethics and the very existence of virtues (e.g., Harman
1999). But many virtue ethicists find these “situationist” discoveries fully
compatible with an ethics of virtue. For philosophers like Elizabeth
Anscombe and Iris Murdoch, the search for a realistic moral psychology
went hand in hand with an interest in virtues.
CHAPTER 6
Dewey’s Empirical Ethics
Abstract Focusing on Dewey’s late text “Theory of Valuation” Hämäläinen

offers Dewey’s work as an entrance point to a descriptive moral philosophy.
Dewey shares with the mainstream of present-day analytic philosophy the
emphasis on a search for rational grounds for (moral) conduct. But the
grounds he seeks are nothing we think up in an armchair. His hopes go
rather to the developing social sciences and psychology, which suppo-
sedly will provide us with a richer understanding of human practices.
Dewey’s theory of valuation has lately been picked up by social scientists
who study the ascription and application of value in various contemporary
social practices. The research done on this field of “valuation studies”
provides at its best a kind of empirical philosophy of values and offers, in
any case, a broad range of insights into sites where evaluative decisions are
taken and evaluative standards are consolidated.
Keywords John Dewey Valuation Valuation studies
Dewey, in a sense, shares with the mainstream of present-day analytic

philosophy the emphasis on a search for rational grounds for moral con-
duct as well as for moral goals or ideals. But the grounds and goals he seeks
are nothing we think up or discover in the course of argument, and they
are not to be fixed in and through philosophy. They are rather to be seen
as evolving with our changing forms of life.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_6
This general view has implications for his idea of the role and purpose of
moral theory. Moral theorizing is in his thinking an aspect of our moral
lives: It is a reflective practice, which seeks to think systematically about
our moral views and the criteria for our moral assessments, when this is
called for. “Moral theory cannot emerge when there is positive belief as to
what is right and what is wrong, for then there is no occasion for reflec-
tion” (1932, p. 173). In a time of rapid change—quick communications,
industrialization, the telephone, great advances in the sciences (medicine,
not least)—new demands are placed on our capacities of moral and
evaluative judgment, because both our knowledge and the very situations
in which we find ourselves are different from what was before. Thus, he
notes that “the present time is one which is in peculiar need of reflective
morals and of a working theory of morals” (1932, p. 188).
This does not, as such, sound too different from the view proposed by
Fotion (see Chap. 4), but Dewey’s idea of “a working theory of morals” is
something much more mobile, malleable, and practice oriented than the
comparison would suggest. The task of theory is to serve as reflective
resource when we encounter problems where habitual modes of thinking
do not work. Theory helps us remake our thinking and doing in intelligent
and responsible ways, not by offering a fixed framework with supposedly
atemporal standards (or a struggle between alternative theories), but pre-
cisely by being responsive to what is happening around us and what we are
going through.
This orientation toward practical problem solving that we find in
Dewey’s idea of the role of theory is also at work in his view of normative
principles. The moral life is not in Dewey’s view well captured by postula-
tions of a fixed good, fixed norms, or fixed forms for moral conduct. We
do not, as moral creatures, suffer from the lack of an account that would
give unambiguous answers to our quandaries (such dogmatic accounts
may in fact be harmful for our moral lives), but we do often suffer from
impulses and desires that are not properly checked by reflection. Reflection
does not aim at fixating values or procedures, but at orienting us in the
world of values which is ours. He notes that “The difficulty in the way of
attaining and maintaining practical wisdom is the urgency of immediate
impulse and desire which swell and swell until they crowd out all thought
of remote and comprehensive goods” (1932, p. 225). The solution to this
practical difficulty is a particularly positive one, which at the same time
leaves the question of ultimate goods and proper acts open: “In the main,
solution is found in utilizing all possible occasions, when we are not in the
6 DEWEY’S EMPIRICAL ETHICS 51
presence of conflicting desires, to cultivate interest in those goods which

we do approve in our calm moments of reflection” (ibid.). The cultivation
of interests thus interestingly takes the place of a focal aim in Dewey’s
“moral theory,” precisely by virtue of being a means for making reflection
bear on our practical conduct. It is not a postulated “highest good” but a
good which will enable our reflective faculties to have more of a say in our
practical conduct. This allows him to be utterly undogmatic concerning
the contents of ethics, while at the same time giving quite substantial an
idea of how we can improve our moral conduct and moral community.
Moral conduct is improved by engagement with the things we upon
reflection find good, but a reflective take on morality also demands reflec-
tion over and knowledge about what our lives are becoming or have
become. Thus Dewey’s philosophical hopes go to our constantly mobile
experience and to the developing social sciences and psychology, which he
believes will provide us with a richer understanding of our own practices
and conditions, to help us arbitrate between better and worse in the course
of our practical lives. Abstract philosophical concepts and dichotomies
(instrumental value vs. intrinsic value, individual vs. society) are, in his
view, a central source of philosophical confusions that can mostly be
overcome only by looking more closely at what we actually do, what we
are, and how we live. (In the emphasis on sciences he is quite distant from
Wittgenstein, whereas concerning the repudiation of habitual philosophi-
cal abstractions and the attention to practice they could not agree more.)
Philosophy, Dewey notes, was born in response to social change
(Dewey 2008). The moral community of Socrates’s and Plato’s Athens
was facing new uncertainties, and traditional knowledge was no longer
considered a solid source of moral guidance. In response to this the
philosophers invented the discourse of the transcendent Good, Just, and
so on, in contrast to the muddle of everyday conceptions. The trouble,
which was distinctively historical and local, received a mode of solution
which was by definition above and beyond historicity and contingency.
The real and true, in the emerging philosophers’ picture, had to be
atemporal. But what was achieved through this intellectual effort was
an inherently dysfunctional form of thinking, which still harms moral
thought in our time. Perhaps paradoxically the eternal forms, born in
response to change, turn out to be particularly unsuited for making
moral sense in a rapidly changing society.
The analysis of philosophy’s mistakes, inherent in Dewey’s genealogical
picture, could be described as one of the twentieth century’s central
philosophical themes. Its anti-metaphysical core sensibility is in different

ways articulated by the most central philosophers of the century: the
pragmatists, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, logical empiricism, early analytic
philosophy, as well as Foucault. The prominence of this critique of philo-
sophy, as the search for firmer (metaphysical, theoretical, systematically
presentable) ground, is perhaps the most striking fact about philosophy in
the twentieth century. Correlatively the most striking fact about philoso-
phy in our time is perhaps that the critique has in important ways been
forgotten, misunderstood, or simply dismissed: in the new analytic meta-
physics, in the moral philosopher’s search for grounds, in new trends like
object-oriented ontology.
This anti-metaphysical sensibility was in the case of logical empiricism
and analytic philosophy accompanied by the conviction that values and
morals are not a proper domain for knowledge. The Deweyan critique of
metaphysical thinking is, to the contrary, accompanied by the conviction
that value is a central, and not particularly problematic, issue in philoso-
phy. Seeking knowledge about things moral is, in Dewey’s view, not as
different from seeking other kinds of knowledge as we are accustomed to
think. Philosophy, as we inherited it from the Greeks, has taught us to
ask for timeless truths and to consider historical and temporal happen-
ings as imperfect, ephemeral, and philosophically uninteresting. But
value and evaluation are not fixed unchanging objects, looming some-
where above or beyond the tangible human world. This picture, with its
awkward metaphysical presuppositions, is merely bound to make our
thinking about values confused and unable to grapple with the things
that really make difference in our lives. Modern science has, in large areas
of human understanding, replaced the search for unchanging forms with
empirical attention to the concrete, changing world. There is no reason
why our study of morality and value should not go through a parallel
process.
In accordance with this ethos Dewey presents in his late text, “Theory
of Valuation,” the theoretical underpinnings of a transition from the
investigation of “value” to the investigation of practices of valuation.
This transition, its underpinnings and its implications for moral philoso-
phy, will be my concern here and perhaps the most important thing that
Dewey contributes to a descriptive and yet philosophical ethics. He
begins his discussion with the metaethical disputes which defined the
question of the nature of value in philosophy, in his time as much as in
ours. As he puts it:
a survey of the current literature of the subject discloses that views on the
subject range from the belief, at one extreme, that so-called “values” are but
emotional epithets or mere ejaculations, to the belief, at the other extreme,
that a priori necessary standardized, rational values are the principle upon
which art, science, and morals depend for their validity. . . . The same survey
will also disclose that discussion of the subject of “values” is profoundly
affected by epistemological theories about idealism and realism and
by metaphysical theories regarding the “subjective” and the “objective”
(Dewey 1939, p. 1).
In short, the investigation of value is submerged in grand epistemological

and metaphysical theories which propose quite contrary approaches to
value, without giving much clue to how to proceed with investigating
them. Against this setting Dewey finds it hard to formulate a “starting
point which is not compromised in advance” (ibid.) by being the result of
some “prior epistemological or metaphysical theory.”
“Values,” in the abstract mode in which they figure in these debates, are
in Dewey’s view the source of endless and futile debates concerning their
“mode of being.” Acts of valuation, in contrast, are concrete happenings
with discernible effects in the world. Thus, a substantial part of the “Theory
of Valuation” is dedicated to arguing that “valuing,” rather than being the
ephemeral feeling proposed by emotivists, is closely related to “modes of
behavior” like “caring for,” “cherishing,” “tending to,” and “being devoted
to.” He strives to get “theory away from a futile task of trying to assign
signification to words in isolation from objects as designata. We are led
instead to evocation of specifiable existential situations and to observation of
what takes place in them” (Ibid., p. 14).
Studies in the realm of value should be concrete and empirical: “It is by
observations of behavior—which observations (…) may need to be extended
over a considerable space time—that the existence and description of valua-
tions have to be determined” (Ibid., p. 15).
This turn from value to concrete instances of valuation has three dis-
tinct, though interrelated, benefits for Dewey. It enables him to (1) get
away from empty ontological debates, (2) force value inquiry and ethical
inquiry to pay attention to the empirical world, and (3) redirect philoso-
phy from the study of supposedly atemporal forms to the study of chan-
ging reality. Thus investigated, Dewey believes, value judgments will turn
out not to be so very different from other kinds of judgments; they are yet
another aspect of human beings’ practical engagement with her situation
and surroundings.
Part of our trouble with values has to do with the inflated role
assigned to the idea of end-values and things with supposed unchanging
intrinsic value. Our life in the realm of value should not, in Dewey’s view,
be conceptualized as one of finding contingent means to abstract final
ends, but rather one where we formulate what he calls ends-in-view in
response to concrete questions and problems that arise in our day-to-day
existence. Valuation only takes place when habit is broken; thus there is
“an intellectual factor—a factor of inquiry—whenever there is valuation”
(Ibid., p. 34).
Dewey seeks to illustrate these points through an analogy with the
physician’s diagnostic work and the abstract idea of health. The physician
has to determine the course of action necessary for relieving his patient
from an ailing condition. Considering the patient’s troubles he forms
ends-in-view and takes measures to help the patient get rid of the troubles.
But he does not have an absolute conception of health as an end-in-itself
that would determine the course of inquiry and treatment.
On the contrary, he forms his general idea of health as an end and a good
(value) for the patient on the ground of what his techniques of examination
have shown to be the troubles from which patients suffer and the means by
which they are overcome. There is no need to deny that a general and
abstract conception of health finally develops. But it is the outcome of a
great number of definite, empirical inquiries, not an a priori preconditioning
“standard” for carrying on inquiries. (Ibid., p. 46)
Just like the abstract notion of health may have a role for the physician, the
abstract formulations of central values as ends have their role in the process
of valuation, but not as fixed, a priori guiding stars. They are handy
abstractions of things we may need to attend to, but also changing and
responsive to what happens at “ground level” in the actual work of
valuation, how we solve our problems by formulating new ends-in-view.
By directing attention to concrete happenings in our common world,
away from a priori metaphysical postulates and unnecessary abstractions,
Dewey wants to open up for a study of value which fosters an intelligent,
sensitive, and situation-bound attention to our valuations. The philoso-
phers’ task in ethics and value theory is not to explain, explain away, provide
foundations, or fix ends, but rather to help us understand and critically
examine our acts of valuation, the working ideals in and behind them,
the practices upholding them, and their actual effects in the world.
Dewey’s preferred approach is thus distinctly descriptive and empirical,

seeking to uncover what is rather than what ought to be, but it has a
critical aim in the modifications that we make to our practices when we
understand their natures and ways of functioning better. What has pre-
viously been a central and sensible value may over time lose its place.
Valuations make sense as part of a way of living, and certain ideals guiding
our valuations may lose their sense when conditions change. Science and
technology also bring new objects of concern into being, and changing
material conditions make new political and social arrangements practic-
able. Technological advances and industriousness, which have done much
good for human kind, come forth as problematic in the face of global
warming. In our real lives, means come to be valued as ends, and ends are
transformed by the means that are used to reach them. The proper study
of value is thus framed as starting with attention to aspects of our world
which are not necessarily available to us from the armchair. We need to
know how our practices and valuations make sense, how they have chan-
ged or are changing, and what makes them change or remain the same.
Yet Dewey’s own work on these issues is very much the philosopher’s
discussion of principles for study, rather than the hands-on empirical work
that he calls for. The questions remain: How does such empirical inquiry
function? What would its relation be to philosophical reflection? These
things are to a certain extent yet to be discovered. The effect of Dewey’s
work on conceptions of value in contemporary Anglophone moral philo-
sophy and value theory is practically nonexistent, but Dewey’s theory of
valuation has lately been picked up, as one central reference, by social
scientists who study the ascription and application of value in various
contemporary social practices. (See, e.g., Muniesa, Kjellberg et al.) This
novel interest in the question of valuation is not so much prompted by
a scholarly rediscovery of Dewey or primary concern with the value-
theoretical issues that Dewey investigates in his Theory of Valuation. It is
rather the consequence of a recent proliferation of practices of valuation and
evaluation in various institutional settings. Rational government of public
bodies as well as private enterprises is increasingly seen as requiring the
explicit formulation of values and goals, along with procedures of evaluating
how well these goals have been reached. Also in the management of our
individual lives we are increasingly encouraged to valuate and evaluate.
Forms and procedures of self-evaluation are dispersed through work places
and public health institutions, as well as self-help manuals and glossy
magazines.
For the social scientist, attention to these practices of valuation offers a

window to some central sites where our collective evaluative frameworks are
remade (see, e.g., Lamont). These studies include attention to things like
different contexts of valuing a tomato (Heuts and Mol), the appreciation of
the monetary value of environmental damage (Fourcade), assessment of the
life skills of youth in danger of exclusion, and the self-assessment strategies of
self-help literature. The research done in this broad field of “valuation
studies” can at its best provide a range of insights into sites where evalua-
tive decisions are made and evaluative standards are consolidated or
undone. The aim is a multifaceted, nonnormative, comprehension of
our own forms of life: where we are and where we are going. But there
is also often a critical intent in studies of this kind: By exposing novel
practices of valuation we may come to discover abuses of power (humi-
liating instruments for assessing people in distress), arbitrary or surprising
transfers of ideals from one domain to another (e.g., organizational ideals
that travel from the private to the public sector), educational practices
that do not accord with the needs of students and society, and so on. In
both the descriptive role and the critical role these studies are remarkably
true to Dewey’s intent: They exhibit a very Deweyan mixture of empirical
inquiry and situated, piecemeal assessment and reassessment of the valua-
tions revealed.
But what does this work have to give to philosophers, who may quite
legitimately persist in the conviction that these social scientists involved in
the study of valuation are not addressing the problems of philosophy, but
merely tending to their own disciplinary concerns? First we must remem-
ber Dewey’s conviction that the philosophers’ immediate concerns in
research must be remade if they are to find their way out of the mesh
they have made for themselves in the study of value. He insists on observa-
tion of behavior and obviously that is a task more easily interpreted in
terms of the practices of social science than in terms of philosophical
argument. But we should also see that the study of valuation (as a general
topic area)—as prompted by Dewey, but also as done by social scientists—
is a kind of empirical philosophy of values. It asks about specific contexts
and specific agents, but its philosophical core is the fascinating unfolding
of the very human process of valuing, value change, and the constant,
practical, collective making and remaking of the very horizon that
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra famously thought had been wiped out. It is, in
this sense, to borrow J. L. Austin’s phrase, a species of “fieldwork in
philosophy” (Austin 1956–1957, p. 9). Instead of considering this a
concern for other people, I suggest that we moral philosophers think of it

as an area of perhaps necessary rapprochement between philosophers,
social scientists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, as well as others
with similar concerns.
CHAPTER 7
Wittgensteinian Applications
Abstract One of Wittgenstein’s lines that could be cited as a motto

is “Don’t think, look and see” (PI § 66). This can be described as an
empirical and descriptive but not scientific creed for the practice of philo-
sophy. Wittgenstein focuses on language use, but language for him is
always merely one aspect of human practices. Philosophical trouble is in
his view frequently caused by use of language which has become mean-
ingless through the loss of an appropriate, meaningful setting. By “bring-
ing back words” to their ordinary uses we retrieve a sense of their proper
functioning. In ethics Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has inspired a body
of work which is less concerned with our language and more with our
lives. Rather than focusing on moral language, the work of philosophers
like Peter Winch, Cora Diamond, and Raimond Gaita has been concerned
with describing (their own, our own) frameworks of moral life where
certain ways of talking and thinking make sense. Moral philosophy, in
these terms, is a kind of excavation of one’s own moral understanding.
Keywords Ludwig Wittgenstein Cora Diamond Description
In contrast to Dewey, Wittgenstein finds little room for empirical, scien-

tific research in the elucidation of philosophical problems. Where Dewey
emphasizes empirical attention to our practices of valuation, for the pur-
pose of a reorientation of our philosophical study of values, Wittgenstein

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_7
(of the Philosophical Investigations, hereafter PI) would place empirical

concerns and the accumulation of data consistently outside philosophy.
There is a very simple, indeed simplistic, way of approaching this differ-
ence, which focuses on their difference in time and place. Dewey rides on
a wave of scientific optimism. He invests, like many of his contempor-
aries, high hopes in the scientific approaches to humans and human
societies, seeing in them the promise of a more rational, humane, and
enlightened society. He retains this impulse in his late writings. The
borderlines between philosophy and these other fields are not sealed,
but rather porous, the need to read outside one’s field is pressing and
obvious. Wittgenstein again comes slightly later and is introduced to
philosophy through the Vienna circle on the one hand and the
Cambridge philosophy of Russell and Moore on the other. They too
represent a scientific optimism, but it is a different one, increasingly
placing a strain on the very possibility and meaningfulness of philosophy.
Part of Wittgenstein’s unavoidable task is to negotiate a role for philo-
sophy in a world of research which is increasingly defined by specialized
scientific inquiries.
It should be noted at the outset that I am not here concerned with
interpretations according to which there could, properly speaking, be
no Wittgensteinian moral philosophy, because Wittgenstein supposedly
placed ethics outside the realm of the philosophical. The substantial body
of work in “ethics after Wittgenstein” proves this emphasis redundant
(Cavell, Paul Johnston, Cora Diamond, Raimond Gaita, etc.). I am not
concerned with what a properly Wittgensteinian ethics would or should
be, or even with Wittgenstein’s own thinking on ethics, but rather
with how the questions of ethics are shaped by philosophers under the
influence of Wittgenstein.1 Post-Wittgensteinian ethics is, arguably,
shaped more by Wittgenstein’s ideas of language and the nature of philo-
sophical work, than it is by his ethical ideas.
I will argue that the contribution of post-Wittgensteinian moral
philosophy benefits from being understood as part of the tradition of
descriptive moral philosophy and also adds to our picture of a philoso-
phical descriptive ethics. Here it constitutes a distinctively philosophical
(in the sense of nonempirical) response, or indeed a certain range of
distinctive responses, to the question of what ethics in the descriptive
mode can be. Wittgenstein’s idea of what philosophical description
amounts to poses an interesting challenge to the other philosophers
that I discuss in this book, through its introvert, non-expansive, concep-
tually oriented, and rather armchairish approach. Before moving on to
7 WITTGENSTEINIAN APPLICATIONS 61
characterize post-Wittgensteinian ethics, I will give an outline of some of

Wittgenstein’s central methodological notes in the Investigations.
Philosophical inquiry, in Wittgenstein’s view, begins with confusion:
“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I do not know my way about’”
(PI § 123). What prompts this confusion is often the sense that language is
out of joints or does not work to express what we need to, or produces
contradictions. Yet the solution to it is not that we propose novel ways of
speaking that would overcome the problem we perceive: “Philosophy may
in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only
describe it. /For it cannot give it any foundation either. /It leaves every-
thing as it is” (PI § 124). Philosophical work is thus about coming to
terms with what we already, in some sense, have: the language, the con-
ceptual resources, the ideas. We look for a new way of seeing things,
though not through uncovering something that was hidden:
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor
deduces everything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing
to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us. One could
also give the name of “philosophy” to what is possible before all new
discoveries and inventions. (PI § 126)
Philosophy is conceptual work of a kind, but not inventive work. “The

work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular
purpose” (§ 127). It is the work of assembling what we already know in a
new way, so that the problem we perceived is dissolved. Its guiding virtues
are patience, humility, perceptiveness, and carefulness. It is not grand. The
point is not to say something new, but to bring what is already before us
into view, so that its presence and obviousness speaks to us. “If one tried
to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate
them, because everyone would agree to them” (§ 128).2
This procedure, idiosyncratic as it may seem, is prompted by the
difficulty of noticing what is closest to us: our ordinary ways of speaking,
our most fundamental beliefs and habits, our framework of understanding.
“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because
of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—
because it is always before one’s eyes)” (§ 129). Philosophy thus is the
work of recovering the ordinary—it does not bring us new knowledge, but
rather reorganizes what we already in some sense knew.
One of his lines, that could be cited as a motto for his later philosophy,
is “Don’t think, look and see” (PI § 66). Combined with the earlier
quoted methodological injunctions, we get the impression that the scope

of “look and see” must be quite specific and rather narrow. The philoso-
pher qua philosopher stays close to home and does not, in his philosophi-
cal work, “look” in order to extend his knowledge of things. By “bringing
back words” to their (variety of) ordinary uses we retrieve, in the course of
inquiry, a sense of their proper functioning and regain the capacity to
speak meaningfully about a given issue. The philosopher’s interventions
are local and concrete, concerned with how we should speak to make
sense in a situation, though they can have repercussions in wide areas of
understanding, especially in cases where the concepts investigated have a
key role in a philosophical discussion.
Wittgenstein is adamant about not presenting a theory of language
(or a theory of anything else), but behind this method there is a specific
picture of language that could be summarized in the following points:
(1) Language is an aspect, dimension, and part of human practices;
(2) the uses of a word in natural language cannot be contained in
a definition; they often, rather, relate to each other through “family
resemblances” that can be traced or mapped; and (3) this practical
character, impervious to definitions, is essential to the way natural
language works. Technical and scientific language works in a different
way, allowing and indeed demanding strict definitions for specific pur-
poses. But philosophy is not a technical or theoretical pursuit in this
sense. Its task is to help us think over difficult questions, issues, and
concepts that we encounter in our ordinary lives. Truth, knowledge,
love, goodness, the self, the mind, God, free will, and so on are part of
our vernaculars and the problems related to them are not solved by
proposing novel definitions that would change their meaning and use.
Yet philosophy has the tendency to do precisely this: Rather than
becoming clear about the nature of our ordinary understanding, it
heads for technical and theoretical abstraction to replace our ordinary
understanding. But by this means nothing in the line of understanding
is achieved and an empty abstract debate is conceived.
Thus, Wittgenstein, like Dewey, is centrally concerned with how
philosophical and theoretical abstraction distorts our understanding of
the world, but he envisions the task of philosophy as one quite different
from the one guided by Dewey’s empirical appetites. Indeed, one of his
central methodological instructions has to do with the distinctiveness of
philosophical inquiries from scientific ones. As he puts this in the much
quoted passage of PI:
It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. . . .
And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must be nothing
hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation,
and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light,
that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of
course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the
workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize
those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems
are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have
always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of language.
(Wittgenstein, PI § 109)
This is a luminous picture of the task of philosophy, which has inspired

many people to a kind of low-key work of reclaiming our language from
theoretical abstraction, looking instead closely at the way we talk about
things in quite ordinary situations. In order to understand Wittgenstein
rightly in contrast to Dewey’s empirical cheerfulness, it is important to
appreciate what kind of idea of knowledge seeking Wittgenstein is speak-
ing against here. He addresses a specific idea of what the advancement of
knowledge is, modeled on science: the making of theories that allow us to
formulate hypotheses, which can be tested, with the goal of assembling
more (and more accurate) facts about the world, or alternatively, the
assembling of data in order to be able to make predictions, projections,
and generalizations based on it.
Summing up, both Dewey and Wittgenstein can be seen as intensely
engaged with the scientific worldview of the twentieth century and
critical of the Western traditions of philosophical theory. Dewey is
enthusiastic over the possibilities, opened up by the social sciences and
psychology, for a better understanding of human behavior and human
communities. Wittgenstein again sees philosophy, above all, as an inde-
pendent form of thought, at risk of being distorted or misunderstood
due to the dominating role that scientific modes of knowledge and
knowledge seeking have achieved. This does not of course explain the
difference between them concerning the role of empirical input in phi-
losophy, but it can provide a starting point for negotiating the terrain
between them. The articulation of a descriptive ethics in our time can
benefit much from a clarification of the contrast between Wittgenstein
and Dewey in this matter, because of the way they embody two partly
contrary and partly mutually supportive aspects of the twentieth-century
rethinking of the nature of philosophy.
Nonetheless, Wittgenstein’s credo that philosophy does not seek new

knowledge, merely reorganization of what we already know, has been
central for the shaping of post-Wittgensteinian discussions on ethics as
well as on other topics. The passage from § 109, quoted earlier, has
prompted philosophers like Stanley Cavell (1976) and Raimond Gaita
(2003) to emphasize the distinction between “conceptual” investigations
that are conducted through attention to language and “empirical” inves-
tigations that are conducted by collecting new information. This is an
important matter and I will return to discuss this idea of philosophy and its
limitations in Chap. 9, which is dedicated to the relationship between the
“empirical” and the “merely descriptive” in the articulation of a workable
descriptive moral philosophy.
The interesting matter for present purposes is what kind of moral
philosophy this idea of the philosopher’s practice has inspired and how it
contributes to enriching our descriptive take on morality. One could claim
that the most interesting kinds of work done in the spirit of Wittgenstein
give emphasis to “look and see” rather than “conceptual, not empirical”
and indeed interpret the look and see in a rather more open-ended way
than Wittgenstein’s own remarks suggest. In ethics Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy has inspired a body of work which is perhaps less concerned
with our “lives in language” and more with our “lives in language.”
Rather than focusing on moral language or paying attention to how we
speak in situations of moral significance, the work of philosophers like
Winch, Diamond, and Gaita has been concerned with describing (their
own, our own) frameworks of moral life, our life worlds, our forms of life,
where certain ways of talking, thinking, and doing make sense. The most
telling form of this work has been their philosophical discussions on
narrative literature. In these discussions the literary text performs a num-
ber of interlinked functions:
1. First, a literary narrative is offered, to present a morally, philosophi-

cally, or existentially interesting case or scenario.
2. Second, our attention is directed to aspects of the scenario which are
not helpfully illuminated through the use of standard ethical theory:
The literary piece works, for example, as an aid in seeing aspects or
“seeing as,” or as a way of reminding us of some aspects, of our
everyday world or modes of interaction.
3. The literary work is brought forth as a site for the renegotiation of
understanding and communality. Conversation over a piece of
literature or a reading of a piece of literature will offer a place for

seeking a common understanding of the lives depicted, the moral
questions, goods and evils exposed, as well as the concepts involved.
The result is not necessarily perfect agreement, and even in cases of agree-
ment in judgments the “action guidance” gained through the philosophical
effort is left rather vague. The real gain of the inquiry is a richer under-
standing of the moral horizon of the story and the moral horizons of the
(philosophical) interpreter and of oneself, as reader, interlocutor, or partner
in conversation. Together they constitute an inquiry into what we live by
but often do not quite see, how we talk about it, and what our words mean.
Moral philosophy, in these terms, is a kind of excavation of one’s own moral
understanding, together with others, much in line with Wayne Booth’s
(1989) idea of ethical criticism in his book The Company We Keep.
This line of work can be characterized as antitheoretical, but its
proper purpose is not the negation of the philosophical tendency to theorize
(as D. Z. Phillips 1992 thought) but rather the careful and nonreductive
articulation of our way of life and our ways of making sense of life. There are
many styles of doing this even among the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers
and I will here merely briefly look at one, which has been particularly
influential in shaping the ways in which younger philosophers in this area
understand their task. The case is Cora Diamond, and the text I refer to here
is a brief introduction (2004) to her classic essay “´Having a Rough Story
about What Moral Philosophy Is” (included in Diamond 1991). In this
introduction she explicates the Wittgensteinian influence which is strongly
present, but not highlighted or developed in the earlier text.
Diamond draws here on Wittgenstein’s letter to Ludwig von Ficker,
concerning the Tractatus, where he notes that his work “consists of two
parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is
precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits
to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced
that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits” (Wittgenstein,
quoted by Diamond 2004, p. 129). The point, as Diamond sees it, is that
“the Tractatus can help one to understand the ethical only if one oneself
turns this absence of the ethical in it into something that transforms one’s
understanding” (ibid.). What one may learn here, concerning the ethical,
is not something that is in the text, that the author holds in his hands and
conveys to the reader, but something that the reader must figure out for
himself. This sounds curious, but the play of presence and absence can be
given a perfectly commonsense reading, especially when reflected through

Wittgenstein’s remarks on literary texts. A similar movement of thought is
at work in Wittgenstein’s preference for certain literary works. Diamond
notes that “throughout his life, Wittgenstein greatly admired Tolstoy’s
Hadji Murad. He wrote about it with great enthusiasm to Russell in
1912, and to Norman Malcolm in 1945. Tolstoy, he said to Malcolm,
impressed him infinitely more when he turned his back to the reader and
just tells a story, as opposed to the Tolstoy of Resurrection” (Ibid. p. 129).
In Wittgenstein’s view Hadji Murad inspires ethical (and philosophi-
cal) thought and manages to say something profound, precisely by
remaining silent concerning potential lessons that the reader should take
home. Tolstoy in his didactic mood is, in this view, not only a worse
author and artist, but also a poorer source of ethical insight.
These observations should not be understood as pointing to the view
that Wittgenstein gestures here toward some mystical, ineffable truths.
(This is neither what Diamond thinks of Wittgenstein nor what Diamond
herself wants to say.) The idea is rather that certain forms of insight do not
have to do with what we know or what propositional beliefs we hold or
which evaluative commitments we share, but are rather about how we look
at the world, how we engage it, and how it engages us. The literary author,
who is not didactic, but lets his judgment rest in the act of just telling a
story, may provide for us (if he is good writer) not only a more gratifying
work of art, but also a better and more fulfilling place for transformative
ethical thinking than a didactic text. The transformation of our ways of
looking is not external to philosophy, but internal and indeed essential to
it. Philosophers, when emphasizing verbalized, argumentatively assessed
conviction, tend to miss out on the real adventure of philosophy and the
real challenge of ethical thinking, which is precisely this transformation.3
This train of thought can easily be connected to the chain of remarks
quoted earlier from the Investigations, where it was established that phi-
losophy does not present a theory or hypothesis and that philosophical
problems are not empirical ones. These lines of reasoning come together
in post-Wittgensteinian ethical readings of literature, in a specific way of
articulating what such readings are about: Literary texts do not present
theories or hypotheses; they do not give us facts about a matter or argue
the rightness of a given normative view. Neither do they illustrate posi-
tions that are already established elsewhere. Or they can indeed do all of
these, but these things are not what make a literary text ethically or
philosophically interesting. Their real philosophical and ethical work, in
this view, has to do with our concepts, and the way things appear to us, the
ways we conceptualize the things that are already known to us. They do
their work as a part of “working on oneself. On one’s own understanding.
On the way one sees things. (And on what one demands of them)”
(Wittgenstein, 2005: § 86).
This is an important insight concerning the role of literary texts in
relation to ethical thought and moral philosophy. It is also a profound
idea of what ethical insight is and what philosophical progress may
require.4 But it is also a view which we need to problematize here. Its
danger lies in an undue focus on what we already have and know (what we
only need to reorganize for a better understanding). Some philosophical
investigations may indeed properly be of this kind, and some readings of
literature may indeed do precisely this sort or (merely) reorganizing work.
But good literature is also and always a window to the world, to what is
not ourselves, not our world. It always adds, pleasurably or disquietingly,
to what we know: It enriches us. This expansive movement involved in
reading and sharing literature is not only important for understanding
what literature is and does. It is equally important for formulating what
is at stake in the remaking of our own understanding and our shared
understandings in philosophical work.
Philosophical readings of literature do not add to our “empirical”
knowledge of the world, but they do rely on complex forms of experience
that may be ours, but may equally well be completely foreign to us.
Reading literature is putting experience on trial. In reading stories we try
our language and our concepts, but also share experiential possibilities.
There is an aspect of “hypothesis” and “experiment” (in a broad Deweyan
sense) both in the writing of fiction and in the reading of fiction for
purposes of moral reflection. It makes sense to frame this experimental
aspect of literature in Stanley Cavell’s (2008) terms, as exercises in “seeing
aspects” or “seeing as.” As such it could be conceptualized in terms of an
inquiry into ordinary language (Forsberg 2013), a conceptual inquiry or
an inquiry into what we did not know we knew. But this is, as I want to
emphasize, only one side of the story. Post-Wittgensteinian ethical discus-
sions on literature are only partly inquiries into what we already knew or
the uncovering of aspects of our “lives in language.” They are also about
negotiating a lived experience by putting it into dialogue with the lived
experience of others. Literary readings in this genre contain confrontation
with otherness as well: new discoveries, the imagining of things we did not
know, the effort to learn more about things beyond ourselves. In fact they
contain much of the same empirical appetite, the curiosity about the real
that is emblematic for Dewey, though by other means. Novels, even
when based on thorough research, are obviously not documents of the
real. But the aim and direction of studying novels in moral philosophy is
more often than not that of putting us in relation to something that is
not us or ours—that is not exhausted by the reorganization of what we
know or a discovery of “we did not know we knew” (Murdoch 1997,
p. 12). Ian Hacking quite helpfully notes, in response to Cora Diamond
and Stanley Cavell (in the little book Philosophy and Animal Life), that
“In any event, the relations among seeing, seeing as, and new informa-
tion are subtle” (Cavell et. al. 2008, p. 145). Barring “new informa-
tion”—empirical reports, new data, the experience of others—from
philosophical studies is artificial to say the least, because sometimes
indeed it is precisely new information that will settle or change the
debate. So the question is: How do we reconcile the (demand for)
“new information” with the idea of philosophy as a reorganization of
our understanding of what is already there for us?
It is typical for the post-Wittgensteinian philosophical use of literature
that the line between new information and what we already knew is
blurred. Some psychologically accurate and culturally familiar texts, like
the short stories of Raymond Carver or Alice Munro, may operate, in
their original context, rather little on the possibility of being informative
and much on showing us the familiar anew. The moral philosophical
interest in the authorships of J. M. Coetzee or Doris Lessing, however, is
only partly due to their capacity to enter into our own sensibilities as, say,
Western literate persons, with certain kinds of moral horizons and moral
concerns. It is equally due to how they use settings that we may know
little about: colonialism, Rhodesia, South Africa. New thoughts, new
information, new pictures mingle with what we did not know we knew.
It is no coincidence that post-Wittgensteinian moral philosophers
fashion themselves as interested in “philosophical anthropology.” And
anthropology, even if it is “philosophical,” cannot be merely about
reminding us of what we already in some sense know. From this per-
spective, the idea of the philosophers’ work as “conceptual” constrains
the philosophers’ “look and see” in ways which may in actual practice be
counterproductive to Wittgenstein’s own project of uncovering our
forms of life through description.
Attention to the nature of the communality of philosophical work,
in Wittgenstein’s view, may support this reading. In contrast to what is
often supposed, Wittgenstein does not picture “our language,” that is, “ordin-
ary language” as finished and readily available. Discovering and uncovering
aspects of our own forms of life in language is rather a constant work, and
the communication of one’s discoveries requires that one finds a common
horizon of understanding with one’s interlocutors. Conversations in phi-
losophy fall under the same rule as other conversations in the respect that
communication requires agreement in presuppositions.
If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not

only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. This
seems to abolish logic but does not do so. It is one thing to describe
methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results of mea-
surement. But what we call “measuring” is partly determined by a certain
constancy in the results of measurement (PI, § 242).
We should keep in mind that language for Wittgenstein (as for the
pragmatists, as for Foucault) is always merely one aspect of human prac-
tices and forms of life. Communication relies on a shared world, and to
write, read, and talk about philosophy is to seek communality. It is to seek
common ground below the abstraction of philosophical theory. It is a
shared exercise in thinking about our world and our ways of inhabiting it
in language and deed. The insistence on philosophical inquiries as con-
ceptual tends to delimit the seeking of common ground to the negotiation
of what could be called “linguistic intuitions,” the native speaker’s com-
mand over his linguistic apparatus, and ability to trace his way back to
ordinary language use, where theorization, abstraction, or simplification
has led him astray. This is the primary ground where negotiation is to be
conducted. But philosophical conversations often come prematurely to a
halt when conducted in this way. People’s ideas of “what we should say
when” (Austin 1956) may differ. Looking for arbiters external to the
participants’ linguistic intuitions the philosopher may reach for empirical
facts about language use or empirical data about the objects of discussion
or instead seek common ground by the use of stories or literary narratives.
What I would suggest is that, under closer scrutiny, the picture of
philosophy suggested by Wittgenstein in § 109 earlier was perhaps too
luminous to be helpful. The contrasting of the philosophers’ proper,
merely “descriptive” work with “theory,” the “hypothetical” and “empiri-
cal,” lures us into too narrow and rigid ideas of what one or the other of
these can be. The kinds of description that are relevant and enriching for
our philosophical understanding of morality and our moral forms of life

do not exclude the empirical or even the hypothetical. A helpful descrip-
tive philosophy will often be reliant on knowledge or insight which the
philosopher could not have brought forth on his own: empirical data, the
literary author’s experiences, and artistic experiment, among other things.
The assembling of new facts or new insights does not provide us with
ready answers to philosophical quandaries; in this sense philosophical
questions are not empirical ones. But when reworking our understanding
and negotiating common perspectives with others—the work on our
concepts and how we see things—we are as much reliant on what we did
not already have before us, on what is new to us, as we are on transforming
our understanding of what we had.
Thus I propose a kind of practical marriage in ethics between Dewey’s
empirical spirit and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on conceptual elucidations.
An adequate descriptive moral philosophy for our time needs to be
sensitive to the kinds of conceptual elucidation prompted by Wittgenstein
(on how we see things and how we talk about them), in conjunction with
a philosophical appetite for all kinds of things that science and arts can
bring us. A philosophical study of morality will most often not be a
project of describing something external to ourselves, but will rather,
importantly, also be an odyssey into how we see and conceptualize
things. This is the central insight from Wittgenstein. Yet how we see
things and talk about them and how our ways of seeing and talking
change are not disconnected from what we know and what we are
acquainted with. Reading a sociological study on how ecological damage
is translated to monetary value in the United States and in France
(Fourcade 2011) may teach us something crucial about our ethical form
of life. So may a collage of case studies on multiple personality disorder
(Hacking 1995) or even some rather dull statistical data concerning the
correlations of socioeconomic status and certain illnesses. Above all a moral
philosophy which is unable to learn from these kinds of studies is a moral
philosophy condemned to be ignorant of its own time and place and
guiding presuppositions.
In order for Wittgenstein’s work to contribute to the broader project of
a descriptive ethics, the narrow idea of philosophy as pure, nonempirical,
conceptual elucidation must be overcome. Indeed, looking at the rich
curiosity about the world that is emblematic for Wittgensteinian philoso-
phers we could say that this idea, though true to Wittgenstein verbatim, is
not true to the spirit and direction of his inquiries.
NOTES
1. Nonetheless, for an excellent overview of Wittgenstein’s own evolving ideas
on ethics throughout his work, from Tractatus to his late thinking, see
Christensen 2011.
2. The original German for “agree to” here is “Einverstanden” which denotes
inclusion (in point of view) rather than merely shared opinion.
3. For similar lines of argument concerning the philosophical and ethical roles
of narrative literature see, for example, Jonathan Lear (2010) on J. M.
Coetzee and Niklas Forsberg (2013) on Iris Murdoch. A similar idea of
the lesson not being in the texts is also prominent in Peter Winch’s classical
discussion of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Winch 1987).
4. This is a central point of agreement between Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch
(see Hämäläinen 2014), and Diamond draws on both of them when devel-
oping her view of the ethical role of literature.
CHAPTER 8
Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy

of the Self
Abstract Like Dewey and Wittgenstein, Foucault is a thinker of the

moving horizon, not interested in uncovering universal principles, but
rather in understanding the different ways in which humans come to
know about themselves and their world and act upon themselves and
others: the conditions of possibility of taken-for-granted views and prac-
tices. Not all of this knowledge is ethical in any sense of the word, but
much of it is. Foucault’s late work, especially volumes 2 and 3 of the
History of Sexuality, is often described in terms of being his work on
“ethics.” But these late writings present only the culmination of a thick
descriptive and historical inquiry into moral personhood, ancient as well as
modern. The essential input of his work for a descriptive ethics lies in his
capacity to describe the complex interdependence of practices, institu-
tions, values, forms of personhood, and forms of conceptualization. He
also exhibits an intense relationship to his own moral present, which is
exemplary for a descriptive philosophical ethics.
Keywords Michel Foucault History of the present Genealogy
If we add together Dewey’s expansive empirical appetite and Wittgenstein’s

meticulous attention to “how we live our lives in language,” we have two
different but complementary entries to the investigation of our own moral
habitat. What we need now is to turn to the historical dimension of our

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_8
moral and evaluative forms of life. Wittgenstein is not a philosopher known

for his interest in history, but on the other hand the whole idea of forms of
life with a “natural history” is thoroughly premised on a keen awareness
of deep historical change, which may render the idea of universal moral
principles deeply problematic (Hämäläinen, 2014). In post-Wittgensteinian
ethics this aspect of Wittgenstein’s work can be seen in the greater readiness
of these philosophers to embrace the historicity of morality and the mut-
ability of our forms of life. But this is a contested issue within post-
Wittgensteinian philosophy.
The historical dimension is a central interest for Dewey, but I will not
here open up the issue through his work. I turn here rather to Foucault
and Taylor, who will transport us to one of my most central concerns:
the question of how the present emerges out of its pasts. I return here
to the quotation from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science borrowed as one of
the mottos for this book, because it opens up a picture of moral study
startlingly different from the picture held by moral philosophers, and
one which will help us approach Foucault.
Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for
himself an immense field of work. All kinds of individual passions have to
be thought through and pursued through different ages, peoples, and
great and small individuals; all their reason and all their evaluations and
perspectives on things have to be brought into the light. So far, all that
has given color to existence still lacks a history. Where could you find a
history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of pious respect for
tradition, or of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or at least of
punishment is so far lacking completely. Has anyone made a study of
different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular
schedule of work, festivals, and rest? What is known of the moral effects
of different foods? Is there any philosophy of nutrition? (The constant
revival of noisy agitation for and against vegetarianism proves that there
is no such philosophy.) Has anyone collected men’s experiences of living
together—in monasteries, for example? Have the manners of scholars, of
businessmen, artists, or artisans been studied and thought about? There
is so much in them to think about. (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 81–82)1
Two things in this potential to-do list deserve immediate notice. One is
that, in fact, quite a number of people have been fulfilling the tasks set in
this passage over the past century and a half. Cultural historians today keep
themselves busy with precisely these kinds of matters, trying to make
8 FOUCAULT’S ARCHEOLOGY AND GENEALOGY OF THE SELF 75
visible the passions, habits, and perspectives of people in various times and
settings. And what is qualitative research in sociology but the collecting of
people’s experiences of living together in our time? Another thing to be
noted is that parts of it read as a list of the works or potential works of
Michel Foucault: a history of punishment, a history of madness, a history
of attending to daily habits and dietary prescriptions.
A “study of moral matters” is for Nietzsche here a study of what “has
given color to existence,” of the forms and manners in which human
beings make sense of their existence, and on the basis of which they build
their world. A history of moral emotions and virtues and of the institu-
tions within which these are shaped, of the everyday patterns of doing
and being which moral philosophy cares little about, but to which we do
give considerable moral weight in our day-to-day lives: the feeling of
existential legitimacy that we get from having a full calendar, the neces-
sity to write a page or two before noon lest the day be spoiled, the moral
satisfactions of various strictly regulated diets—these and the like are part
of the stuff of Foucault’s scholarship, from early to late. But where
Nietzsche’s words here are the hovering, visibly self-satisfied smile of
the momentarily invisible Cheshire cat, Foucault is quite earnestly visible
and present in his strenuous attempts to dig and to trace, to help unfold
the practices out of which our modes of thinking of ourselves and the
good are crafted.
To replace “moral philosophy” with a “study of moral matters” opens
up, for inquiry, a vast number of possible, probable, and improbable
entities that have bearing on our moral lives. Epochs, places, institutions,
texts, groups, habits, words offer themselves as equally plausible (if not
more plausible) objects of study than the canon of philosophical texts and
the questions we habitually take to be most distinctively moral. Obviously
this kind of study is unsuitable to anyone too fond of neatness and
completeness. It suits the temperament of a historian better than that of
a philosopher, and precisely because of this its sharpest edge is pointed to
the philosopher who entertains the thought of settling all things moral in
the comfortable embrace of his armchair.
Foucault takes on the smiling challenge with an unusual capacity for
work and an evolving battery of questions quite distinctly his own, not
immediately concerned with “moral matters.” Of course, unlike the bois-
terous Nietzsche of this passage, who mischievously seems to grant all
things moral a potentially equal interest, Foucault’s work has its pre-given
focal point in the philosopher’s own present. The question that brings his
studies together is the question of what we have become: the twentieth-

century human being as an amazing and surprising product of distant
times and places.
His early studies, The Birth of the Clinic and The History of Madness,
take on the task of studying the institutions that take shape around
human illness and human deviance. In The Order of Things he investi-
gates the institution of scientific knowledge concerning language, life,
and labor in what the French call the classical age. His philosophical
invention lies in the so-called archeological method, a mode of digging
into the deeper layers of the understanding of a given epoch. He offers
not just the history of experience, asked for by Nietzsche, but proposes
to excavate the underlying forms that give sense and coherence to a
given mode of thinking and that seem to settle the boundaries of what
can be meaningfully said.
He shares with a number of contemporaries, like Thomas Kuhn,
the insight that we will learn little of the nature and development of
human knowledge if we treat previous frameworks of understanding as
confused and inferior varieties of our own (Kuhn 1962). What we
need to understand are the principles that organize understanding at a
given time and in a given place. This is not to deny potential super-
iority to present modes of understanding, but to offer more truthful
grounds for any reasoned claim to superiority. If we do not under-
stand the organizing principles of past frameworks of thought, then
we do not know these systems and cannot judge them without utter
arbitrariness. The lesson of Foucault’s archeology for a descriptive
ethics lies precisely in his attention to the depth, complexity, and
holistic nature of systems of knowledge, understanding, and concep-
tualization. Just like in the case of science, our moral past does not
consist of stages in the teleological development toward the present
(say, present-day liberal humanitarianism), but of moral orders quite
differently put together. Understanding how the moral order of some
previous time was put together may help us better understand what
our own order is like: what is contingent and what is necessary in it,
which factual or metaphysical beliefs it relies on, how it relates to the
parts of our worldview which we think of as external to morality, and
so on. An archeological study of a moral system would be an exercise
in what it could be to take a moral framework as a whole, in its own
present complexity, and make it into an object of inquiry.
But what the archeological method lacks is a substantial analysis of the

very process of transition and change. Manners of doing and conceptua-
lizing come about and cease to be, but the early Foucault, familiarly, has
little to say about how and why the changes he has found occur in the first
place. This is to be remedied in his subsequent work (Gutting 2005,
pp. 45–46). By the time of Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault is
comfortable writing about the dynamics of change: His attention to the
emergence of the modern prison centers on how the practical problems
and conflicts come to be addressed with practical solutions in the hands of
people and how practical solutions again give birth to new practices which
remake our understanding. The central topic of the book—the changes
that occur in punitive systems between the classical age and our time—
constitutes a virtual diorama for illustrating and enacting a number of
philosophical lessons, some of which are historical and some of which are
atemporal. These include the following:
1. The idea that modernity is not distinguished by an increase in the

freedom of people and a decrease in the exercise of power, but rather
by a different organization of power
2. The idea that the modern era is not fundamentally more humane
and that the pursuit of more humane and compassionate modes of
governance has not been the driving force of modernization
3. The idea of an intimate relationship between power and knowledge:
how the exercise of power is both dependent on and generative of a
given mode of knowing
4. The idea of a dispersed or agentless power typical of modernity: that
power in the modern era is bureaucratized and based on knowledge
as expertise—the experts who in the modern world hold the knowl-
edge that makes people act in given ways are not necessarily hier-
archically above those over whom they exercise their power
All of these points have potentially important implications for morality and
the pursuit of moral philosophy, not least concerning questions of indivi-
dual freedom, autonomous agency, coercion, and moral epistemology.
But the most central insight for the purposes of a descriptive ethics is the
rather low-key insight that the motors of societal change frequently are
lowly and practical, that changes in modes of understanding are premised
on changes in practice. New thinking emerges in tandem with doing and
with needs to reorganize one’s doings. Thus practice, not theory, not
ideas, constitutes the best vantage point for making sense of change.
Foucault’s “genealogical method” is thus born as a work of tracing the
mundane and the concrete. This again, does of course not mean that
thinking could never be the source of change. The claim is not here related
to the anti-intellectual chant that thinking, theoretical reason, and scholar-
ship are inert or ineffective. The point is rather that when thinking is
divorced from the practices and institutions where it has a home and
makes sense, the process of change in thinking, conceptual change, and
the changes in structures of thought are often rendered unintelligible or
open to serious misunderstandings.
But why is this of such importance for present purposes? Foucault’s way
of putting this idea to work disperses the mystery attached to the transi-
tions between epistemes, that is, regimes of knowledge, as he described
them in his earlier work, because he can trace the interplay between ideas,
language, and practice where certain ways of speaking and knowing
become meaningful in relation to specific quotidian doings. This very
same move, if we are convinced to try it, can help us disperse the mystery
in transitions between morals past and morals present: It gives us tools not
only for describing different moral habitats and the different moral atmo-
spheres of different historical settings, but also helps overcome the mystery
in gaps between different moral orders within our own present world,
because we can see how they are rooted in practical life and undergoing
change. Seen as parts of a broader form of life, we can more easily make
sense of how one becomes the other. In short, Foucault’s practice-
oriented take on change—social, moral, institutional, political—provides
us with a practical model for describing not only a stable moral world, but
also a moral world in motion.
We can note that Foucault, like Dewey, is paying attention to proble-
matizations as central for evaluative change.2 We encounter something as
a problem, or formulate something as a problem, and venture to solve it.
Both the formulation and the solution remake our understanding of what
we are dealing with. The practical remaking of manners and aims of
human action opens up through attention to a moment of trouble, an
agonism, a ripple in the smooth continuity of activities. But where Dewey
celebrates the moment of practical readjustment, of remaking of both
means and ends, as an opportunity for progress, Foucault is noncommittal
concerning the positive gains inherent in historical change. This is not
because something like “improvement” would, in Foucault’s view, be
impossible, but rather because our propensity to think in terms of progress
is prone to make certain important things more difficult to perceive. First,

modernity has its own distinctive forms of oppression, many of which we
easily do not recognize if we see our world as the current endpoint of
progress, and second, thinking in terms of progress will make us less
capable of understanding the independent nature and internal coherence
of previous modes of understanding.
In Foucault’s genealogical thought the archeological idea of the relative
synchronic coherence and integrity of a system of thought is, thus, in a
sense, preserved, although in a substantially qualified form. Changes in
thought and practice are no longer pictured as sudden, unannounced
upheavals, but rather as the contingent sums of a range of contingent
things and events that happen to come together. For any interesting event
or phenomenon in a human society we can trace a number of partial
contributory factors and a large element of arbitrariness. As Foucault
says in a late interview with Rux Martin, “In my books I have really tried
to analyze changes, not in order to find the material causes but to show all
the factors that interact and the reactions of people. I believe in the
freedom of people. To the same situation, people react in very different
ways” (Foucault 1988b). Or as Gary Gutting helpfully puts it “Foucault
was skeptical of grand teleological narratives focused on such goals and
proposed instead accounts based on many specific ‘little’ causes, operating
independently of one another, with no overall outcome in view” (Gutting
2005, p. 46). The factors adding up to the modern punitive system, and a
modern understanding of the role and rationale of legal punishment,
include the actions of many people who have reacted to situations and
reasoned about measures in individual ways.
Like Wittgenstein, Foucault is thus interested in our own forms of life,
but what the comparison brings out is the lightness with which
Wittgenstein handles the notion, investigating it mainly from the arm-
chair and separating it from any deeper investigation of the historicity
and materiality of these forms. Both Wittgenstein and Foucault have
been taken to be mainly concerned with discourse, words, language,
but for both, language is only one aspect of a form of life. As Hacking
notes concerning the latter, “Foucault’s books are mostly about practices
and how they affect and are affected by the talk in which we embed them.
The upshot is less a fascination with words than with people and institu-
tions, with what we do for people and to people.…Foucault has not been
locked in a cell of words. Moreover, it is precisely his intellectual work,
his philosophical work, that directs our attention away from our talk and
onto our practices” (Hacking 2004, p. 47). Words, in this kind of inquiry
(whether done in the armchair or in the archive), are a kind of doing and,
for linguistic beings, an accompaniment of nonverbal doings. Discourses
are an aspect of the human way of being in a herd, of grazing together.
For neither of these two philosophers is there to be discovered an exact
way in which linguistic activity generally corresponds to nonlinguistic
activities.
In the case of Wittgenstein I bypassed the study his own various
remarks on ethics and focused on how his work has been put to use by
others in moral philosophy. In the case of Foucault, similarly, the most
central import of his work for a descriptive ethics is not in the texts that he
himself most clearly thematizes as ethical. We need to take a brief closer
look here at why this is so.
Foucault’s late work, especially volumes 2 and 3 of the History of
Sexuality, is sometimes popularly described as his work on “ethics,” in
contrast to his previous work on language, knowledge, and power, assum-
ing that this is the part of Foucault’s production directly relevant for moral
philosophy.3 What Foucault here identifies as “ethics” is a specific area of
morality: an exercise of the self, the kind of work that a person does upon
himself, in order to shape himself as a subject in relation to moral
demands. His studies elucidate the practices of this shaping of oneself as
a subject in two different contexts: Greek antiquity in The Use of Pleasures
and Roman antiquity in The Care of the Self. These late writings present
the culmination of a thick descriptive and historical inquiry into the
making of moral personhood, ancient as well as modern. From the
large-scale and modern focus of his previous books—underlying structures
of scientific language and rationales of institutional organization in the
management of people, language, power, and knowledge—he moves to
the ancient world and small scale of the individual person’s attentions to
himself, in the realm of the body and its appetites. The tone of the two
later parts of the History of Sexuality is more intimate and less heavily
theoretical than his previous work, and they are often experienced as a
more pleasant read. Without doubt the turn toward ancient practices of
the self brings new concerns into Foucault’s work: explicit attention to the
ethical, explicit attention the individual person’s relation to himself, and a
novel room for freedom in the practices of the individuals’ self-making.
The person is not only a product of practices, discourses, truths, and
power-structures that surround him, but a participant maker of the unity
that is to become himself.
One way of spelling out Foucault’s relevance for moral philosophy

today, following this identification of a late ethical phase in his pro-
duction, is that Foucault (1) suggests a definition of ethics where the
formation of the self takes precedence over rule-bound and other-
regarding aspects of the ethical or moral life and (2) affirms this
precedence of self-care as his own ethical (moral philosophical) stand-
point. There are several different developments in contemporary moral
thinking that contribute to the attraction of this idea of ethics. We
have the emergence of virtue ethics in Anglophone moral philosophy
from the 1960’s onward, which has rekindled an interest in the idea of
the ethical life as the cultivation of dispositions—that is, the cultivation
of oneself. We can also perceive, in contemporary moral philosophy, an
interest in the possibility of formulating (in Murdoch’s words) a “phi-
losophy to live by,” as an antidote to the technicalization of philoso-
phical discussions over the past decades. For this purpose the ancient
schools of philosophy that provide Foucault’s materials in his late work
are generally found inspirational. Furthermore, the themes of mental
and bodily self-care that are foregrounded in these works have a pop-
cultural parallel in the contemporary self-help industry, which has by
now conditioned our cultural mindset toward the idea that the parti-
cipation in regimes of self-cultivation is central for our moral lives.
Thus, the idea that the late work constitutes Foucault’s contribution to
ethics gains support from a certain attraction that the idea of small-scale
practices of the self exercises on contemporary moral thought. But to
confine our idea of Foucault’s relevance for moral philosophy to the late
work would be problematic for three interlinked reasons.
First, Foucault is very clear about how his concept of ethics as self-
formation only covers one aspect of the moral life. Ethics in this sense is a
subcategory to morality (1990, pp. 25–29). He reverses the ordinary,
though fluctuating, usage where “ethics” stands for a broader category
of concerns about “how one ought to live,” while morality is a specific area
of ethics, concerned with rules of (other-regarding) conduct. But there is
nothing peculiar about this, if one notices how he introduces the notion in
the third part of the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, since there is no
stable manner of using these words in philosophy. His notion of ethics is
not meant to replace the ordinary range of concerns of moral philosophy,
but to name within it an area and subject matter which is perhaps insuffi-
ciently attended to in modern philosophy: the individual’s constitution of
himself and work on himself as a moral subject. It is thus not possible to
derive something like “Foucault’s ethics,” meaning “Foucault’s moral

philosophy” as a whole, from these late works.
Second, the isolation of the late work to an “ethics” would be to
neglect the continuity of Foucault’s work, perceivable in his writings and
stated by himself. In the early 1980s he notes retrospectively that “Perhaps
I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am
more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others in
the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an indivi-
dual acts upon himself, in the technology of self ” (1988b, p. 19).4 Stated
like this, the core of his work comes forward as an interest in the making of
people, by themselves and by collective others, through practices of per-
sonhood on a larger or smaller scale. From this perspective, what is
distinctive to the late work is the smaller scale (one’s work on oneself),
whereas questions relevant to ethics or morality have been part of his work
all along.
Third, and most important, the idea of Foucault’s late work as his ethics
is bound to make it more difficult for us to perceive the immediate and
immense relevance of archeological and genealogical investigations for our
enquiries into our historically formed moral forms of life. This relevance is
my main concern here.
Without downplaying the current and future importance of Foucault’s
interest in self-practices I would suggest that Foucault’s central contribu-
tion to moral philosophy is how he teaches us, through his own example,
to attend to our current assemblages of knowledge, practices, beliefs, and
concepts as contingent products of many quite random happenings
(Foucault, 1984a). The archeological approach opens for the moral phi-
losopher a way of treating previous or foreign moral frameworks as deeply
different from ours and yet traceable and understandable. It does not offer
a dull, non-transparent relativism (as Taylor 1984 thinks), but an adven-
turous researchability of the past through attention to how other systems
have made sense. The genealogical approach offers a practical perspective
on the anatomy of change: that we should not look for explanations to
present phenomena in the past but rather trace the complexity of their
origins.
All this searching of the past points to the present: to gaining a new
understanding of what we have and who we are. Not so that the past
would constitute a victorious path to the present (as the standard enlight-
enment narratives would have it), but in the sense that the things we take
for granted in the present are both destabilized and illuminated. Through
the contingencies of becoming we come to see the firmness, deep

groundedness, of what we are, but also its necessary openness to change
(Foucault 1984b). This mode of inquiry, in the realm of moral philo-
sophy, can cover virtues as well as rules, institutions as well as practices;
it can be extended to all the things moral that are listed in the passage
by Nietzsche above. It provides a wide range of ways of making sense of
our moral present by the aid of history: an ambitious but also perhaps
more risky strategy for a rich descriptive ethics than what is offered by
either Dewey’s attention to practices of valuation or Wittgenstein’s
attention to how we live our lives in language. What it does not provide,
of course, is a normative ethics to tell us what makes actions good or
bad. Neither does it provide us with an idea of what the central con-
cerns of a moral or ethical philosophy should be: The whole list of
things moral suggested by Nietzsche present themselves as possible,
exemplary objects of interest. (This again is a question that should
remain unanswered in this book.)
But there is one thing above others that Foucault asks his genealogical
questions about, and that is the human subject, such as he has become by
the mid-twentieth century. He is not a human constant, but a quite
specific creature, whose constitution has been formed by a variety of
things: religious and spiritual practices, scientific knowledge, institutional
practices, medical practices, and so on. This asking about the human
subject through attention to practice, and forms of expertise for guiding
practice, is equally prominent in the work of certain thinkers inspired by
Foucault. “What kind of creatures do ‘we’ think we are, we human beings?
And how have we come to think of ourselves in this way?” These are
questions posed by Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached at the beginning
of a recent sociological article on neuroscience (Rose and Abi-Rached
2014). Similarly Hacking asks, at the outset of his book Rewriting the
Soul (2005), a number of questions concerning memory that could be
paraphrased as follows: How did memory become a central category for
understanding a range of disparate phenomena, which seem to define
what we human beings are? He then goes on to study the emergence
of therapeutic practices, diagnostic criteria and beliefs around multiple
personality syndrome—all of which operate on a quite particular connec-
tion between memory and personhood.
For these thinkers, the open-ended questioning of “the human” is con-
nected to a certain open-endedness in the pursuit of sociology/philosophy.
When seeking to understand the historically malleable human in its
historically changing habitats and in its relation to qualitative distinc-

tions, then the moral theory of the Western tradition will not be the
primary choice. Nonetheless there is something distinctly ethical to these
questions. Moral philosophy, in its habitual trappings, proceeds from
postulations and definitions, but what we want to understand is the good
and evil of a historically formed creature in the world, not a supposedly
simple “agent” or even a complex “self” with supposedly universal
attributes. Moral philosophy tends to take agents and subjects for
granted, while these thinkers, following Foucault, ask how contemporary
phenomena like the sciences of memory, psychiatry, and neuroscience
are continuously at work in reconstructing our idea of what a human
person is (and how a person relates to its world).
Like Dewey and Wittgenstein, Foucault is a thinker of the moving
horizon. He is not interested in uncovering universal principles, but rather
in understanding the different ways in which humans come to know about
themselves and their world and act upon themselves and others: the
conditions of possibility of taken-for-granted views and practices. Not all
of this knowledge is ethical in any sense of the term, but much of it is,
insofar as it concerns who we are, what we do (and do not do) to ourselves
and others and how we build our world. And above all much of it is likely
to have an impact on how we understand the subject matter of moral
philosophy. The task of the philosopher here is to comprehend and to
make comprehensible in order to open up for a possibility to transcend the
given. “My role—and that is too emphatic a word—is to show people that
they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence,
some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history,
and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change
something in the minds of people—that’s the role of an intellectual”
(Foucault 1988b, p. 10).
We need to look a bit closer at this ethos of change in order to disclose
its significance for the descriptive project of moral philosophy that is under
construction here. In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984b)
Foucault traces his own manner of doing philosophy to Kant’s essay
with the same name. Where Kant’s critiques seek to articulate the universal
conditions of reason, as they appear when liberated from human beings’
self-inflicted immaturity, this text brings forth a different, temporal Kant,
whose most intense philosophical relationship is to his own present.
The distinction here is not simply one between universality and histori-
city, but something rather more intricate. Historicity, if we follow
Foucault, is present in all of Kant’s work. The critiques too are expressions
of a time and answer to a temporal demand: the people of the enlight-
enment coming to realize their rational nature. “The critique is, in a sense,
the handbook of reason that has grown up in the enlightenment; and,
conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of critique” (1984b, p. 38). The
universalizing address of these is what Anglophone philosophy has inher-
ited from Kant, but mostly stripped of the sophistication of its historical
frame. Kant’s more expressly ghistorical texts again deal with historical
processes, origins, and the future. The enlightenment text stands out, not
because of its historicity but because of the special purpose for which the
historical sensibility is mobilized. As Foucault puts it “this little text is
located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on
history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own
enterprise” (Ibid., p. 38).
Kant poses here the question of what the enlightenment is, as prompted
by the competition of which the essay formed a part, and postulates the
enlightenment as “an Ausgang, an ‘exit’ a ‘way out’” (Ibid., p. 34). It is a
way out of the dependence on the authority of others and the inability to
use one’s own reason. This is characterized by Kant as a phenomenon and
process, but also as “a task and an obligation,” on the one hand of
individuals, but on the other hand also of communities, which must
make possible the free and public use of reason. This second demand
opens up the political dimension of enlightenment. Kant indeed suggests
a contract between rational despotism and free reason: “the public and
free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on
condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself
be in conformity with universal reason” (Ibid. p. 37).
Thus rather than presenting the present merely as descriptive task,
something to be described or articulated, Kant presents his own particular
present as a practical task, a challenge. What Kant according to Foucault
articulates here is “the attitude of modernity,” which he reflects over as
follows:
I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than

as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to
contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end,
a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one
and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.
A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. (Ibid. p. 39)
This idea of modernity, not as an era but as an ethos, is further elaborated

by Foucault through Baudelaire. He notes that Baudelaire not only accepts
and records the transient fleeting character of the present. What is distinc-
tive to modernity “is the will to ‘heroize’ the present” (Ibid. p. 40). And
yet, this heroization is ironical. It does not strive to preserve the fleeting
moment, nor to collect the valued but transient moments as interesting
objects. The modern man is to be distinguished from the flâneur, whose
curious but disinterested mode of engagement is bound to place him in the
spectator’s role. The modern man is dedicated to grasping the present and
remaking the present in the very same act. “For the attitude of modernity,
the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to
imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by
destroying it but by grasping it in what it is” (Ibid. p. 41). This modernity is
further not just a relationship to the present but also a relationship to the
self: It is an exercise of oneself, an ascesis. For Baudelaire this modernity is
most distinctly realized by the dandy, who seeks to transform every aspect
of his being into a work of art. Indeed, in Baudelaire’s view, all of these
aspects of modernity—the theorization, the transformative perception of
reality, and the distinctive ascetism—can only be properly realized in art.
Now putting these two small exegetical exercises together we may
see how Foucault uses them to explicate his own philosophical credo
and his place in the Western tradition. He describes himself as an
intellectual heir of Kant’s Enlightenment essay. His philosophical pas-
sion, in spite of his verbose engagement with the past, is for the
present. The historical and descriptive work is put to active use: The
present is made understandable and embraced as a task by means of
historical analysis of its constituent parts. In this process both the
present and the self are transformed.
But the past uncovered is not faded away, in the process, in order to
give room to an action-oriented, reformist philosophy. It is no mere
ladder to be thrown away when a satisfactory account of the present is
achieved; it forms an essential part of our understanding. Foucault
insists that we must seek to understand ourselves “as beings who are
historically determined, to a certain extent, by the enlightenment” (Ibid.
p. 43). But this analysis shall not offer the habitual story of the progress
of rationality. It rather illuminates the various conditions that made our
present possible. And the task of philosophy for Foucault is not the
transcendental critique of our modes of understanding, but rather “a
critique of what we are saying, and thinking, and doing, through a
historical ontology of ourselves” (Ibid. p. 45). We do not look for

formal structures but at historical and thus transient constellations, and
the conditions we seek to lay bare require attention to what has been
and what is, how one has become the other.
This attention to the historical accidents that constitute ourselves and
our present habitat, has its epistemic justification in the fact that the
ahistorical mode of philosophy often makes us unable to deal with pre-
sent-oriented biases in our thinking. Engaging with the present as histor-
ical increases our capacity to reflect over our own preconceptions and gives
us, ideally, a kind of intellectual freedom and mobility, which helps us to
think new things. This epistemic demand—to know what underlies our
own thinking—is central to my motivation for insisting on descriptive
ethics in philosophy. Unless we take the descriptive work seriously and
are prepared to place it at the center of our endeavor, we will not know
ourselves well enough for a fruitful moral philosophy. Foucault’s reflec-
tions on Kant and Baudelaire highlight his affirmation of a changing
present, the affirmation of both the present and its inevitable ceasing to
be. This affirmation of change at the heart of his thinking is helpful for
understanding the relationship between descriptive moral philosophy and
standard moral theory, namely, it can help us to see that they are not quite
as different as one would think.
Wittgenstein, as we saw, insists that philosophy “leaves everything
as it is,” meaning that philosophy is not revisionist, does not form
new beliefs or new ways of speaking to replace old ones. Dewey
similarly insists that philosophy should turn to look at acts of valua-
tion rather than values as abstract ideal postulates. For these philo-
sophers, like for Foucault, the center of philosophical action is the
bustle of everyday life, not the clarity of abstraction. But the turn to
description does not mean a turn to “mere description” in the sense
of a philosophy which stands still or embraces conservatism, in valua-
tion and worldview.
Where moral theory relies on the transformative potential of system-
atization, grounds, and principles, descriptive moral philosophy relies on
the transformative potential of knowing well our contingent moralities,
valuations, and forms of life, past and present. Description does not lie idle
here. Dewey’s attention to practices of valuation comes with the convic-
tion that describing what we do in relation to value can help us value, in
some sense, better—that is, correct various ills of our evaluative reasoning
and practice. Wittgenstein seeks, in meticulous descriptions of our
linguistic habits, the liberation from unproductive philosophical abstrac-

tions and empty metaphysics. From the descriptive point of view the task
of philosophy is not to arbitrate between, say, Kantian moral intentions
and utilitarian moral consequences. But by investigating the moral uni-
verse in which this conflict looks prominent, philosophy can help us deal
with conflicts of this kind.
Where broadly analytic moral theory seeks, in its quasi-hypothetical
manner, an atemporal moral truth to replace contingent, conflicted, inco-
herent sets of moral beliefs, descriptive moral philosophy seeks, in a more
thorough understanding of these beliefs, the possibility to transcend them
bit by bit, when need be. In the absence of god, modern analytic moral
philosophy seeks transcendence through the perfection of universally valid
theory and argument. In descriptive moral philosophy, to the contrary, the
affirmation of transience joins hands with the hope for transcendence.
Transcendence is not sought in universal illumination but in the shifting
horizon of understanding: the ways in which we are remade and the world
is remade through us. This transience is without an end point or culmina-
tion: It does not even in principle aim at or result in a perfect under-
standing of things moral, because everything undergoes change: human
beings, societies, human bonds, words, meanings, possibilities of doing
and being. New conditions produce new concepts, new concerns, new
articulations, and new solutions. Thus moral philosophy is a constant
reflective companion to moral life, interested not mainly in what is uni-
versal, but also and most centrally in what is contingently present.
This does not mean that philosophers should not and could not take
substantial stands on evaluative issues: Obviously they do so. Dewey is
passionately concerned with the individual human being’s qualitatively
rich engagement with her fellows and her surroundings. Foucault is
concerned with freedom: not only as a philosophical puzzle but as a
moral and existential possibility. The Wittgensteinian moral philosophers
grant a special role to a keen perceptiveness in human situations, inde-
pendently of its instrumental role in facilitating good actions. But these
concerns, as evaluative and moral ones, do not originate in philosophy.
Philosophy is rather a place where they can be articulated and investi-
gated in their complex dependencies on other concerns, values, ideals,
and practices.
NOTES
1. My thanks to Niklas Forsberg for pointing me to this passage.
2. For discussion of this communality see Rabinow (2003), pp. 15–20, 48.
3. This is the case, for example, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The
Stanford Encyclopedia notes, more cautiously, that the “treatments of
ancient sexuality moved Foucault into ethical issues that had been implicit
but seldom explicitly thematized in his earlier writings.”
4. See also the essay The Subject and Power (Foucault 1982).
CHAPTER 9
Charles Taylor’s Affirmation

of the Modern Self
Abstract Taylor’s work offers itself as a vantage point to descriptive

ethics, which seems close to the concerns of contemporary mainstream
Anglophone moral philosophy. He places himself in explicit dialogue with
contemporary Anglophone ethics and social philosophy, and his manner
of coining concepts is amenable to Anglophone moral philosophers. But
his work is constructed in a way which defies the demands of mainstream
moral theory. His most influential book Sources of the Self is not just a
history of ethics or moral personhood. It is also an essay on moral geneal-
ogy, as well as an exercise in moral and evaluative self-knowledge. Not
suggesting a “rational grounding” and theoretical basis for given values
and norms, but rather investigating certain aspects of our own evaluative
framework, Taylor’s project is close to Foucault’s. But in contrast to
Foucault he argues that an affirmative articulation of one’s own normative
commitments is essential for a consistent descriptive moral philosophy.
Keywords Charles Taylor Moral history Self Articulation Moral

sources
With Charles Taylor, the fourth of our quartet of philosophers, we move

closer, again, to mainstream moral philosophy. The two central themes in
his rich work, most relevant for present purposes, are (1) his persistent

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_9
attention to the historicity of moral practices and values and (2) the use of
a historical perspective to articulate the central values of modernity.
Intellectually placed between analytic or Anglophone philosophy and
continental philosophy, Taylor emerged in the 1980s as a central propo-
nent of what was then labeled the communitarian critique of liberalism.
Alongside Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair McIntyre he
criticized the broadly liberal framework of social philosophy and ethics
for a false self-understanding and the denial of the constitutive relation
between morality and community. He has also been one of the central
philosophical elucidators of contemporary morality and spirituality, with
its special mixture of liberal individualism, affirmation of work and family,
secularism, and a novel range of spiritual strivings.
Taylor’s work offers itself as a vantage point to descriptive ethics, which
is closer to the concerns of contemporary mainstream Anglophone moral
philosophy than our three previous philosophers. He places himself in
explicit dialogue with contemporary Anglophone ethics and social philo-
sophy, and his manner of coining concepts is amenable to Anglophone
moral philosophers. But his work is constructed in a way which defies the
demands of mainstream moral theory, perhaps more so than is often
acknowledged by those who appropriate his thought. His most influential
book Sources of the Self is not just a history of ethics or moral personhood.
It is also an essay on moral genealogy, as well as an exercise in moral and
evaluative self-knowledge. Not suggesting a “rational grounding” and
theoretical basis for given values and norms, but rather investigating
certain aspects of our own evaluative framework—that is, our moral pre-
sent—Taylor’s project is close to Foucault’s. Yet where Foucault focuses
on the formation of subjects, leaving the more specifically moral or nor-
mative implications of this to some extent unexplored, Taylor’s work
essentially contains both an extensive argument for how our historically
conditioned conception of personhood is constitutive of our moral frame-
work and a kind of critical affirmation of the liberal humanitarianism which
he presents as the core of our contemporary moral sensibility.
Taylor’s role here is precisely to help form an understanding of
normative commitments under the auspices of a descriptive ethics and
also to suggest that a merely descriptive, fully noncommittal account of
ethics might be impossible or self-defeating. But first we need a brief
tour through Taylor’s point of view. The focus here will be on Sources
of the Self, which offers a helpful and quite explicit counterpoint to
Foucault’s work.
9 CHARLES TAYLOR’S AFFIRMATION OF THE MODERN SELF 93
In the first part of Sources of the Self Taylor presents his critique of
modern moral philosophy and, at the same time, a program for the study
of morals. The central problem of modern moral philosophy is its denial of
moral situatedness, that is, the human person’s unavoidable attachment to
certain values that constitute our moral identity and capacity to make
evaluative judgments. Taylor emphasizes that insofar as we are moral
beings at all, we are this by virtue of being situated, by being someone
for whom certain things stand as valuable, and some of these stand as
absolutely valuable, and as standards against which other evaluations are
made. Modern moral theory, shaped by the liberal instincts that lie behind
both Kant’s philosophy and classical utilitarianism, has sought to formu-
late a purely procedural moral philosophy. Such a philosophy seeks to
articulate what is right without taking a substantial stand on questions of
values. According to this ideal, questions concerning “the good,” values
and the good life, are to be settled by each for himself and are not a fit
object for moral philosophers’ work. Thus moral philosophy is to be
concerned only with a narrow range of obligatory action, the central
goal of which is to safeguard equal freedom and respect for all. The subject
matter of moral philosophy is conceptualized as ahistorical, universal, and
not relative to culture. Morality itself, as the subject matter of moral philo-
sophy, is similarly understood as concerned with a narrow range of questions
concerning interpersonal action, which are essentially disconnected from the
broad range of things we individually find good and valuable.
Taylor himself is critical of the attempts to segregate a narrow realm of
morality from a broader realm of value and the good life. In this he
resembles many other Anglophone philosophers’ writing in the 1980s:
MacIntyre (1981), Murdoch (1997), Nussbaum (1990), and Williams
(1985). The reason for his caution is the view that such a segregation of
the narrow morality often rests on a denial of the fundamental dependence
of a narrow morality on a larger evaluative framework. In order to under-
stand our values and ourselves as evaluative beings we need to see the
larger picture, its historical contingency and its plural sources in the past.
In contrast to the modern conception, Taylor presents a picture where
narrowly moral norms for action depend on and participate in a broader,
historically formed framework of value, and where such a framework is
necessary for human personhood and moral agency.
Taylor further argues that the project of formulating a purely proce-
dural morality is incoherent, because it builds on quite specific values,
which are the product of a range of historically specific developments over
the past two thousand years: the emergence of modern inwardness, indi-
vidualism, the high valuation of freedom from constraints, the humanitar-
ian concern for the well-being of all human beings. We need to look more
closely here at this alleged incoherence.
A defining feature, in Taylor’s view, of both our narrowly moral con-
cerns (how we act toward each other) and the broader “ethical” concerns
that have to do with the good, worthy, and meaningful life, is that we do
not think that our judgments in these areas are matters of simple prefer-
ence or choice. Our judgments are rather guided by values and principles
that do not seem to be up for grabs. These are what Taylor calls “strong
evaluations.” He describes them as “discriminations of right and wrong,
better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own
desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and
offer standards by which they can be judged” (1989, p. 4). Strong evalua-
tions are evaluations of a higher order, which constitute our ethical frame-
work. Ethical frameworks do involve features that may be considered to be
universally human, such as restrictions on killing and harming others
(Ibid., pp. 4–5). But since these “universals” are also culturally mediated
and historically formed, there is reason to investigate our given frame-
works of strong evaluations as historical phenomena.
Related to the notion of strong evaluations Taylor coins the notion of
“hypergoods.” These are “goods which not only are incomparably more
important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be
weighed, judged, decided about” (Ibid., p. 63). It is emblematic for mod-
ern moral philosophy that morality itself is conceptualized by reference to
some such hypergood: Kant’s categorical imperative and Habermas’
emphasis on universal justice are examples of this.
“Strong evaluations” constitute a weave of discriminations that provide
us with orientation among our desires and inclinations. They are a neces-
sary, defining feature of any narrowly moral as well as broadly ethical
framework. Without an idea of higher order discriminations shaping our
choices and providing criteria for evaluating them, we could not have
human agency. Hypergoods, in their turn, are singular goods that are
elevated to a status above all other goods. Not all ethical outlooks have
hypergoods; that is, not all ethical outlooks involve a good that is placed
above all others, as overriding and affecting all of our other, ordinary goods.
Yet hypergoods are a persistent feature of our modern moral world, as
we know it. They can be both collective and individual. Liberal humani-
tarianism is a strong collective hypergood in modern societies, but it can
for individual persons be overridden by the value of artistic creation,

scientific discovery, or even the pursuit of prosperity, where this alternative
striving takes a role of a highest good, properly to be sought at the expense
of all other goods. Hypergoods can be found in theories and public
debates as well as in people’s individual deliberations. Collective hyper-
goods are intimately connected to the idea that a society organized around
the given good is (morally) superior to a society organized around some
other good. As Taylor puts it:
An ethical outlook organized around a hypergood . . . is thus inherently con-

flictual and in tension. The highest good is not only ranked above the other
recognized goods of the society; it can in some cases challenge and reject them,
as the principle of equal respect has been doing to the goods and virtues
connected with traditional family life, as Judaism and Christianity did to the
cults of pagan religions, and as the author of the republic did to the goods and
virtues of agonistic citizen life. (Ibid., p. 65)
Not all ethical outlooks are in this way organized around hypergoods.
Aristotle’s ethics, in Taylor’s view, is a case in point, seeking a comprehen-
sive view of our different goods, without elevating any one of them to a
status where it would rule supreme over others. Modern moral theories to
the contrary, even while hiding their substantial evaluative commitments,
are typically built around hypergoods that are meant to override all other
evaluative considerations: utility, universal respect for persons, and so on.
Hypergoods, like strong evaluations, are historical and potentially tran-
sient. “To have a hypergood arise by superseding earlier views is to bring
about (or undergo) what Nietzsche called a ‘transvaluation of values’”
(Ibid., p. 65). In these kinds of upheavals, previous constitutive values and
the horizons of valuation that they belong to are superseded, and the old
values may even be given a debased, immoral air or reinterpreted as
“temptations.” But a transvaluation is not once and for all, or permanent:
The warrior ethic was superseded in Greek philosophy, in Christianity, in
modern liberal humanitarianism, but it is still in many ways with us. Thus,
again, our evaluative frameworks are complex and, especially when guided
by hypergoods, often inherently agonistic. Nonetheless, these frameworks
provide us with a kind of fundamental orientation, without which moral
reflection and agency would be impossible. As Taylor puts it, “the claim is
that living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human
agency, that stepping outside these limits would be tantamount to
stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged

human personhood” (Ibid., p. 27).
Here the topic of “identity” emerges as central to Taylor’s moral philo-
sophy. Since Sources of the Self coincides temporally with the late-twentieth-
century upsurge of identity talk, identity politics, and a popular culture of
self-development, it may be useful here to say a few words about how
Taylor’s notion of identity is to be understood. It is not a matter of
authenticity, or being true to oneself, discovering one’s true me. Neither
is it centrally a matter of self-making, something we choose, construct, or
elaborate, for example, through choices of lifestyle and consumption. (Ideas
of authenticity, self-making, a true self, etc., are rather specifically contem-
porary forms for talking about, making sense of, and shaping personhood.)
Identity in Taylor’s sense is rather something more rudimentary: an una-
voidable orientation in evaluative space. To be a human being, grown up in
a human society, is to be a creature for whom evaluative distinctions and
values are given and omnipresent. These distinctions form hierarchies: We
may value the making of economic profit, but consider it overridden by
concerns of social justice. We may affirm the value of promiscuous sexuality
and yet see it overridden in our overall judgment by the value of consistent
monogamy. Our identity in Taylor’s sense is our orientation in evaluative
space, particularly regarding those values which for us stand highest and are
of overriding importance. We gain our identities and evaluative frameworks
by growing up in human societies, but communities are not evaluatively
homogeneous. We can experience Nietzschean transvaluations, collectively
or individually. We can be, and indeed often are, deeply conflicted. We can
lose our sense of orientation to the point of insanity. But we cannot move
out of the predicament of being someone in particular for whom certain
considerations are constitutive, without losing our capacity for agency and
choice. Thus there is no point beyond moral identities and horizons from
which we could (even hypothetically) choose a set of values or principles.
Summing up, a distinctive feature of modern moral thought, according
to Taylor, is that it embraces a quite particular hypergood (which is
historically and agonistically formed, by superseding previous and other
goods) and yet denies its allegiance to any particular good. This hyper-
good is liberal humanitarianism, the cherished idea that each individual
human person is above all free and equal, each commanding the same
fundamental moral respect: an idea with deep roots in our Christian
tradition. But instead of consistently articulating this hypergood and
acknowledging its place in contemporary moral, social, and religious
thought, modern moral philosophy, in Taylor’s view, tends to cover it up

by a programmatic inarticulacy about fundamental values. Values are
hidden behind a procedural conception of ethics, which seeks to establish
the right without reference to a substantial conception of the good. The
roots of this proposed neglect are interestingly complex.
There are epistemological and ontological reasons for this inarticulacy.
An important part of it has to do with the naturalism that predominates
modern thought, where the world as investigated by the natural sciences is
seen as paradigmatic for what is real. This naturalism affects our concep-
tualization of values in different ways. In a crude version it amounts to the
denial of the reality of evaluative distinctions altogether or conceptualizes
evaluative distinctions as mere preferences or likings. A more sophisticated
version of naturalism considers values as in some sense real and as a matter
of knowledge, but deriving their reality wholly from a given form of life,
with a strict cultural relativism as a consequence (Ibid., p. 67). In either
case, a substantial philosophical discussion about values and goods is
rendered awkward.
There are also moral motives to the inarticulacy. Among these Taylor
lists the appreciation of ordinary life against supposedly “higher” goods
and the modern conception of freedom which suggest that we should be
able to choose for ourselves in the realm of values and goods. Furthermore
a certain reading of the modern appreciation of altruism and benevolence
gives rise to the idea that we should, morally, focus on plain actions that
benefit others, rather than dwell on the state of our souls and our relation
to various goods. He also notes the desire for a fully universal ethics as a
moral motive for the inarticulacy about goods (Ibid., p. 85).
But, notwithstanding its humane and egalitarian motives, the modern
inarticulacy is, in Taylor’s view, the source of a disquieting lack of intel-
lectual self-understanding in modern moral thought. To be more precise,
modern procedural moral philosophies (placing the right over the good,
supposing that the question of right can be answered without discussion of
goods) build on two denials. First they deny strong evaluations and moral
situatedness, supposing that our moral discernment rests on some kind of
unsituated reason. Second they deny their constitutive attachment to a
historically formed hypergood (liberal humanitarianism), which nonethe-
less works as the half-hidden motor of their thinking and which they
certainly do not think of as purely culturally relative. The theorists of a
procedural morality lift their own historically contingent goods to the
status of something universal and at the very same time hide their value-
character. The result is a truncated and confused view of the role of value
and morality in human understanding.
One part of Taylor’s solution to the philosophers’ predicament is to
trace the constituent parts of our modern ethical framework through
history. In order to see what our form of understanding is, and what it is
like, we need to see how it has come about. Here Taylor is on the same
track with Foucault, but where Foucault’s sources of our moral present
are to be found in practices, institutions, the reorganizations of human
activity, we find in Taylor’s work a keen interest in the great men of
Western philosophy—Plato, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and so on—
along with a range of theological thinkers. In the works of this tradition
we see the modern outlook taking form. In this trajectory of attention
Taylor is certainly less radical than Foucault, but it does serve his pur-
poses. The historical tracing of the coming to be of modern selfhood in
this way has two important functions for Taylor. The first is that it
disperses the sense of obviousness that seems for us attached to the
modern idea of a person. Seeing how what we take for granted has
evolved helps us to conceptualize it as something in particular and to
see how it could have developed differently. We see the ideal in its
complexity, with its plural roots, conflicting strands, and its varieties
of modern manifestations. Thus it gives us means to a better self-
understanding. This perspective is what he essentially shares with
Foucault, although their narratives and focal materials differ.
The second function of the historical perspective is that it makes
possible an articulation of what we find good and worthy in a framework
of moral thought constituted by liberal, individualist humanitarianism.
Investigating its internal tensions—between liberal emphases and humani-
tarian concerns, between unbridled individualism and a universal concern
for persons, the private nature of modern man and his public responsibil-
ities, Christian origins and secular developments—we come to a better
understanding of where we stand in terms of value and where we may
want to go. This is the second part of Taylor’s solution to the philosopher’s
predicament: an affirmative articulation of a certain evaluative outlook. And
this is one place where he differs importantly from Foucault.
Where Taylor’s genealogy in its first role is purely in the province of
descriptive ethics, such as I have sketched it out, it is in its second role
something else. His affirmative articulation of a framework of value and
personhood, while based on a richly descriptive account of historically
contingent ethical thought, moves squarely in the province of what
Murdoch describes as the task to “commend a worthy ideal” (2001,

p. 76). It thus plays a role parallel to that of normative moral theories,
but in a very different way. The aim of articulation is to make sense of our
moral world, so to say from the inside, where certain things matter to us
deeply, other things abhor us utterly, and others again leave us indifferent.
It is to bring our moral world into a kind of self-conscious order, seeking a
conceptually lucid formulation of our own moral and spiritual world view.
Modern moral theories have sought to design a rational apparatus for
providing basic and binding reasons for moral action, stating, for example,
that actions are right by virtue of being in accordance with universal
respect for persons or leading to the greatest happiness or being what
the virtuous person would do. But Taylor emphasizes that articulating a
vision of the good is not about providing basic reasons of this kind. “It is
one thing to say that I ought to refrain from manipulating your emotions
or threatening you, because that is what respecting your rights as a human
being requires. It is quite another to set out just what makes human beings
worthy of commanding our respect, and describe the higher mode of life
and feeling which is involved in recognizing this” (Ibid., p. 77). The
former kind of reason-giving is what moral theories normally ask for,
preferably to be presented in a systematized account. The latter is a kind
of complex picturing activity which seeks a compelling and inspirational
account of moral life. These two are interrelated but different in kind:
It is true that clarification on the second is closely related to the definition of

the basic reason we invoke in the first kind of claim. Our conceptions
of what makes humans worthy of respect have shaped the actual schedule
of rights we recognize, and the latter has evolved over the centuries with
changes in the former. But they are nonetheless distinct activities. They offer
reasons in quite different senses (Ibid., p. 77).
What Taylor calls “articulation” belongs to the province of normative

moral philosophy in the sense of presenting an ideal for the higher mode
of life. But it does not answer, in any straightforward sense, the question of
what makes an action right. It rather seeks to formulate, from within a rich
and complex ethical tradition, a kind of “best account” of our ethical
predicament. A “best account” in this sense is an account that makes the
best available sense of our moral lives, not from some external, supposedly
more objective point of view, but from within those lives: “What we need
to explain is people living their lives; the terms in which they cannot avoid
living them cannot be removed from explanandum, unless we can

propose other terms in which they could live them more clairvoyantly”
(Ibid., p. 58). Articulation is about presenting a vivid and engaging picture
of a good (or a framework of goods) and its place in our lives. It is not
about presenting “reasons” that any suitably rational creature would
accept or a “theory” to conquer other theories of the good and right.
He notes that moral reasoning, as a branch of practical reasoning, “is a
reasoning in transitions. It aims to establish, not that some position is
correct absolutely, but rather that some position is superior to some other.
It is concerned, covertly or openly, implicitly or explicitly, with compara-
tive propositions” (Ibid., p. 72).
Affirmative articulation in this sense is in Taylor’s view important as a
matter of intellectual honesty and consistency: We need to verbalize rather
than try to suppress the values that guide our understanding. But it also
works as a means for moral inspiration. As Taylor puts it: “The central
notion here is that articulation can bring us closer to the good as a moral
source, can give it power” (Taylor 1989, p. 92). The point of articulation
is to move us: A well-formulated and reflective account of the values that
we already in some sense endorse can give us the strength to defend them.
A good articulation of the value of equality empowers our struggle against
inequalities. “The constitutive good does more than just define the con-
tent of the moral theory. Love of it is what empowers us to be good. And
hence also loving it is part of what it is to be a good human being. This is
now part of the content of moral theory as well, which includes injunc-
tions not only to act in certain ways and to exhibit certain moral qualities,
but also to love what is good” (Ibid., p. 93).
This idea of “the good as a moral source” and of inspiration in the
moral life is not one of the easiest to incorporate into the context of late-
twentieth-century or present moral philosophy, and it may seem, in this
light, an awkward addition to Taylor’s philosophy.1 Yet, looking at his
broader context it is not odd at all. It fits naturally with Taylor’s Christian
framework, and a secular, “Platonist,” relative to Taylor’s account, is found
in the work of Murdoch (1992, 1997).2 The ideas of articulation and moral
sources are also familiar from the way many of us have, at some point, been
morally or politically inspired by a theoretical or literary text, where certain
values are vividly and coherently expressed. Some might say that this kind of
inspiration may be a fact of life, but has little place in philosophy. Taylor, like
Murdoch, would disagree, thinking that this is one of the central tasks of
moral philosophy (though of course not the only one).
Where God as an object of moral inspiration and veneration has

become unavailable, and the modern man has relinquished the idea of
transcendent goods, Taylor notes that he may instead find a moral source,
for example, in nature or in the human capacity to “face a disenchanted
universe with courage and lucidity” (Ibid., p. 94). Murdoch, again, una-
bashedly operates in terms of a generic, “Platonic” Good, though one
which is manifest in our everyday attention to people and things.3 For
both, contemplation of the constitutive good, be it generic or more
specified, can inspire us to live and strive in accordance with our best
understanding. As Murdoch puts it: “One might say that true morality is a
sort of unesoteric mysticism, having its source in an austere and uncon-
soled love of the Good. When Plato wants to explain Good he uses the
image of the sun. The moral pilgrim emerges from the cave and begins to
see the real world in the light of the sun, and last of all is able to look at the
sun itself” (Murdoch 2001, p. 90). Murdoch’s elaboration of this image
could be described as an experiential account of moral inspiration. For her
the Good as an object of love and veneration is central to the moral life,
empowering our efforts to think hard about what is good and right and do
one’s best. She comments on the related idea of “good as a transcendent
reality”: “Of course we are dealing with a metaphor, but with a very
important metaphor and one which is not just a property of philosophy
and not just a model” (Murdoch 2001, p. 91).
Murdoch is aware of being unfashionable in a philosophical era which
emphasizes plain theories of uninspired moral obligation, but also con-
sciously connects to a venerable tradition of moral thought. This tradition
includes, not least, Kant with his awe at the starry skies above him and the
moral law within. But a place, in morality and moral philosophy, for inspired
awe, love, veneration of divinity, goods, principles or virtues is no longer
self-given, and thus Taylor questions the idea of “moral sources” in
terms of historical possibility: Are these “moral sources” a thing of the
past or, quite like strong evaluations, an essential part of the equipment
of modern morality and moral philosophy (Taylor, p. 93)? Well aware of
the ways in which the modern philosophical sensibility speaks against
such moral sources, his answer is nonetheless clear. We do have and need
moral sources; something still plays for us a role analogous to the role
played by God or Plato’s Good. The importance of articulating a best
account of our constitutive values supports our relation to such sources.
Affirmative articulation is a kind of renewal that counteracts the flatten-
ing of our idea of moral life.
This is part of the reason why he has no patience with the procedural/
normative tendency in modern normative ethics. But for the same reason
he would not easily yield to a descriptive ethics in the sense I proposed
above: the philosopher’s nonnormative descriptions of moral forms of life.
In fact his whole conceptual apparatus for explicating the moral life—
moral situatedness, identity, strong evaluation, and hypergoods—presup-
poses that we cannot step outside morality in such a way that we would be
philosophically interesting, clear about our motives, and “merely descrip-
tive” in an evaluatively noncommittal manner. A moral philosophy cannot
be ethically noncommittal, because a person cannot be ethically noncom-
mittal, and the values and commitments of the philosopher will be present
in his account of morality, in concepts, concerns, interests, and so on. This
is a serious challenge that we need to address, and I will do so by looking
at Taylor’s critique of Foucault.
9.1 TAYLOR ON FOUCAULT (OR THE ARTICULATION

OF VALUE IN A DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS)
The sharpest edge of Taylor’s critique of inarticulacy about the good is

directed at Anglophone moral philosophy, such as it has become in the
late twentieth century. But interestingly enough, Taylor finds the very
same suppression of constitutive values in what he calls the “neo-
Nietzschean” philosophies of the time. The defining feature of these is
in his view the adoption of a forced neutral stance in relation to the
historically variant systems of valuation, moral thought, and moral prac-
tice. These philosophies stand for a refusal to affirm and identify with one’s
own situation in moral space and thus a denial of things upon which one at
the very same time relies.
The primary case of this kind of philosophy, for Taylor, is Foucault.
I will dwell for a moment on the contrast between Taylor’s and Foucault’s
work here, because it is helpful for articulating the role of affirmative
accounts of values in the context of a descriptive ethics. Wittgenstein
and Wittgensteinian philosophers have, as we saw, insisted that philosophy
has no role in issuing recommendations and that mere description should
take their place (Wittgenstein 1998a, Winch 1989). But the practice of
post-Wittgensteinian moral philosophy speaks of a rather specific under-
standing of this injunction: On the one hand, surely the philosopher as
philosopher has no business in issuing normative commands or postulating
evaluative hierarchies, but on the other hand (as Murdoch too constantly
reminds us), all accounts of human life contain deep moral commitments, in
their choices of words, emphases, and subject matter and concerns.
Foucault too, as we saw, was adamant on a morally noncommittal philoso-
phy, perhaps seemingly at odds with the strong moral energy that drives it.
(I will come back to this soon.)
On the question of the role of normativity in a philosophy con-
cerned with moral matters, Taylor stands close to those analytic
philosophers who in moral philosophy seek clarifying and consistently
argued guidance for the moral life, but he realizes this ideal in a
historically vigilant style which has much in common with critical
theory. In this role Taylor (1984) both candidly and eloquently
voices some of the central worries that a philosopher of the analytic
bent are likely to have in relation to Foucault’s work. The critical
review article in which these issues are discussed was published five
years before The Sources of the Self and can thus perhaps be read as
part of the articulation of Taylor’s own account of the sources of
modern moral personhood. More than 30 years old and prior to
both Taylor’s later major works and the mass of the posthumous
reception of Foucault, this piece is of course not representative of
what could be Taylor’s mature view on the matters he discusses. But
its interest lies elsewhere, in the articulation of a general worry about
a philosophy with moral implications, but without an explicit moral
standing.
Taylor recognizes here an immediate affinity between Foucault’s gen-
ealogical work and his own, in the formulation of a genealogy of modern
personhood and its complex moral implications. But he finds Foucault’s
deferral or indeed denial of a normative or affirmative standpoint deeply
problematic. Apropos Foucault’s analyses of power and personhood in
Discipline and Punishment and The History of Sexuality, vol 1, Taylor
expresses the trouble as follows:
[Foucault] dashes the hope, if we had one, that there is some good we
can affirm as the result of the understanding these analyses give us.
And by the same token he seems to raise a question of whether or not
there is such a thing as a way out. This is rather paradoxical, because
Foucault’s analyses seem to bring evils to light; and yet he wants to
distance himself from the suggestion that would seem inescapably to
follow, that the negotiation or overcoming of these evils promotes a
good. (1984, p. 152)
What troubles Taylor is a kind of paradox in Foucault’s work. The kind of

genealogical critique he engages in seems to give rise to and call for an
affirmative articulation of certain values (freedom, humanitarianism). But
he refuses to acknowledge the values inherent in his own critique and
furthermore refuses to acknowledge, in the modern liberal order, any
changes that would count as advances: “he adopts a Nietzschean-derived
stance of neutrality between the different historical systems of power, and
thus seems to neutralize the evaluations that arise out of his analyses”
(Ibid., p. 162). We get a picture of different orders of coercion, but
no means for arbitrating evaluatively between them. Taylor thinks that
Foucault’s insistence on a neutral stance toward premodern and modern
forms of power/governance actually leads him to downplay significant
qualitative distinctions between past and present forms of power. Modern
forms of increasing self-regulation are not comparable with authoritarian
coercion, and they do represent something that we have reason to prefer.
In fact they are quite familiar, banal, and necessary and do not carry any
previously unidentified form of threat of oppression.
It is a truism of the civic humanist tradition of political theory that free partici-
patory institutions require some commonly accepted self-disciplines. The free
citizen has the “vertu” to give willingly to the contribution that otherwise the
despot would coerce from him, perhaps in some other form. Without this free
institutions cannot exist. There is a tremendous difference between societies that
find their cohesion through such common disciplines grounded on a public
identity and that thus permit of and call for the participatory action of equals on
one hand and the multiplicity of kinds of society that require chains of command
based on unquestionable authority on the other (p. 164).
Interestingly, Taylor here considers it obvious that certain evaluations do

arise out of Foucault’s analyses: that his work in fact affirms an enlight-
enment narrative of the modern age as an age of increasing freedom and
reason. Thus he reads Foucault’s refusal to affirm these values as a variety
of the modern inarticulacy about values, parallel to the inarticulacy of the
analytic philosophers.
Here we could say that it is Taylor’s own view (of values in ethics, of
articulation) that makes him unable here to see the things that are quite overt
in Foucault’s thinking: (1) his strong commitment to freedom as a central
value (indeed a hypergood) and (2) the partly methodological nature of his
refusal to consider modernity as a site of increasing freedom. Where the
standard modern narrative sees in modern democratic institutions and
liberal policies a relaxation of coercive power, Foucault sees them instead

as novel ways of organizing power, with a complex genealogy which can
help us understand them. The initial difference may indeed be one of
how Foucault and Taylor have experienced their contemporary world: as
coercive or humane, and so on. But the point of Foucault’s deferral of
judgment is precisely that it can help us see the contemporary world—its
institutions and practices—in terms that are not dictated by its overt
ideological commitment to liberty: It will help us see our own forms of
coercion and government as coercion and government.
The point of this deferral is never to suppress Foucault’s own commit-
ment to freedom as a central value: merely to interrogate our picture of
our past and present as victorious paths toward its realization. The focus of
his philosophy, and the part of it which I find particularly useful for moral
philosophy, lies not in the affirmative articulation of a value or a frame-
work of values, but in an exploration of the coming to be and the internal
dynamics of our contemporary world of values, institutions, power rela-
tions, and regimes of personhood. The space from which Foucault con-
ducts these inquiries is not a site of imaginary, self-deceiving neutrality,
but rather a systematically worked out, moving trajectory of cultural,
institutional, and indeed moral self-reflection and self-critique.
Nonetheless, Taylor is quite right in raising suspicions concerning what
he sees as Foucault’s suppression of his own guiding values. What we
learn, most centrally, from Taylor and the conflict he stages between
himself and Foucault is precisely a kind of vigilance concerning accounts
of a moral and social order which attempt to take a “view from nowhere,”
because we are indeed always somewhere and we need to acknowledge
where we are in order to understand what we are claiming. What we learn
from Foucault, in contrast, is that discovering where we are (and where we
might be going) may demand that we temporally and consciously seek
ways to see our own forms of life and forms of valuation from a certain
distance.
Mediating in the staged conflict between Taylor and Foucault—and
investigating its various roots and implications—would be a demanding
task for a book in its own right, and I will not attempt to go further into
this here. The aim of describing this conflict for present purposes is to
represent a central tension in any attempt to do moral philosophy in the
descriptive mode. The descriptive task may require that we to some extent
step outside (our idea of) our central evaluative commitments in order to
investigate our forms of life. But we can never step out of our lives entirely,
in order to describe or assess them. Our concepts and ways or reasoning

are imbued with value and worldview. Philosophical reasoning about
morals in the descriptive mode is practical reasoning, “reasoning in transi-
tions,” aiming at orienting us in a world of evaluative distinctions and
demands which are not of our own making. This insight, however, does
not compel us, as Taylor would have it, to shaping moral philosophy
according to the model of affirmative articulation. It can equally well
take the form of a Foucauldian deferral of judgment, to the benefit of a
novel conceptualization of our moral past and present. Somewhere
between these two philosophical gestures—feeling the attractions as well
as the risks of both—seems to me a very good place to begin a moral
philosophy in the descriptive mode.
NOTES
1. For a defense of Taylor’s moral philosophy, but without the idea of sources
see Laitinen (2008).
2. When Murdoch talks about “imaginative exploration of the moral life” she
means something very similar to Taylor’s “articulation” (1997, p. 97).
3. For my account of Murdoch’s special brand of Platonism, see Hämäläinen
(2013) and (2014).
CHAPTER 10
The “Merely Descriptive”

and the “Empirical” Revisited
Abstract Hämäläinen returns to the apparent methodological conflict

between the Wittgensteinian conceptual elucidations and the kinds of
empirical and archival work suggested by Dewey and Foucault. She (1)
discusses Stanley Cavell’s defense of the Wittgensteinian procedure, (2)
offers a critique of this defense, focused on the somewhat arbitrary rules it
places on philosophical study, and (3) provides an analysis of what we can
and should save of this analysis under the auspices of a broader descriptive
moral philosophy.
Keywords Descriptive ethics Empirical ethics Staney Cavell
Having thus discussed the import of these four philosophers for investigating
our moral forms of life, we can see a palette of ways of venturing into a
philosophical descriptive ethics: (1) Dewey’s proposed turn from attention to
value toward attention to practices of valuation, (2) Wittgenstein’s attentions
to “how we live our lives in language,” (3) Foucault’s attention to historical
practices and institutions, and (4) Taylor’s historical tracing and articulation
of central values.
Each of these philosophers has provided an inspirational model for
moral philosophy in a descriptive mode, bringing forth our complex,
contingent moral ways of life, rather than attempting to formulate a
normative or metaethical theory. Each of these thinkers can be seen as

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_10
contributing to a philosophical anthropology in the realm of morals. They

are different but complementary, none of them providing us with a
complete recipe for moral inquiry, but each of them giving resources for
richer and more self-aware ways of doing moral philosophy.
I will now return to the most central and difficult potential metho-
dological conflict among the four philosophers discussed above: the
contrast between the Wittgensteinian conceptual elucidations and the
kinds of empirical and archival work suggested by Dewey and Foucault.
I talk about this as a potential conflict, because it need not be perceived
as a conflict or it may not actualize itself as a conflict in the particular
work one sets out to do. Philosophers like Hacking, Taylor, and Michel
de Certeau have drawn on Foucault and Wittgenstein simultaneously,
and for philosophers like Putnam and Rorty, both Dewey and
Wittgenstein are essential. But for our purposes of a descriptive ethics
there is something deeply disquieting about the way the Wittgensteinian
descriptive investigations are envisioned by himself, and by his followers,
as distinct from and opposed to other forms of description of our ethical
forms of life.
Wittgenstein, as we remember, was very particular about the nature of
philosophical work, which was to be seen as descriptive but not empirical,
not hypothetical, and not theoretical. Its methods and goals were to be
clearly distinguished from those of the sciences. The description of our
linguistic practices was not to be the description of a linguist or even of
an anthropologist, but the attempts of the speaker himself to come to
understand the practices he is involved in, especially where they may turn
out to be dysfunctional or misunderstood, as in the case of what
Wittgenstein called metaphysical language. When discussing Wittgenstein
above I bypassed the peculiarity of this practice, by noting that much of
the most vital and widely read work in post-Wittgensteinian ethics does
not follow any strict procedure concerning keeping philosophy a purely
conceptual enterprise, but takes exactly the freedom it needs. In order to
draw a map of contemporary efforts contributing to a descriptive moral
philosophy, it is enough that we register this work and its relative free-
dom in relation to more dogmatic interpretations of what a properly
Wittgensteinian moral philosophy would be. We could perhaps forget
Wittgenstein’s insistence on the peculiar “conceptual” or “grammatical”
nature of philosophical inquiries, if it were not for the fact that this
insistence can teach us something important about what sets a descriptive
moral philosophy apart from other descriptive moral studies.
10 THE “MERELY DESCRIPTIVE” AND THE “EMPIRICAL” REVISITED 109
I will in this chapter (1) provide a discussion of Cavell’s defense of the

Wittgensteinian procedure; (2) offer a critique of this defense, focused on
the somewhat arbitrary rules it places on philosophical study; and (3)
provide an analysis of what we can and should save of this analysis under
the auspices of a descriptive moral philosophy.
The specificity of the Wittgensteinian practice, in contrast to an empiri-
cal study of how we speak in various kinds of situations, was elucidated by
Cavell in the early essay “Must We Mean What We Say” (Cavell 1976).
The context that prompted this elucidation was an early critique of ordin-
ary language philosophy, following Wittgenstein and Austin, where refer-
ence to “what we should say when” (Austin 1956–1957) and how we
normally speak were stock items. A worry concerning this practice, articu-
lated by Benson Mates (1958), was that the ordinary language philoso-
phers seemed to make up idiosyncratic rules concerning how we speak in
various situations and were hostile to suggestions that people in fact do
not speak quite as they claim. Mates was above all concerned with the
verification of claims concerning ordinary language. Given the role of
“how people speak” as a method for driving out unhelpful or misdirected
philosophical questions and theories, the difficulty of agreeing on how we
ordinarily speak, and the unclarity concerning the status of claims to
ordinariness, seemed to be fatal for the practice, and an embarrassment
for the ordinary language philosophers.
This prompted Cavell to articulate the two central tenets of the practice
of ordinary language philosophy: the nature of native speaker competence
and the nature of linguistic normativity. The contents of this debate are
still a key to understanding post-Wittgensteinian philosophy in this ordin-
ary language philosophy-vein. For our present purposes it provides a path
toward negotiating between Wittgensteinian conceptual investigations
and the empirical and historical inquiries of others. But before entering
into the discussion, it is worth noting that this question concerning the
relationship between conceptual and empirical investigations is equally a
part of the contemporary controversy around x-phi. This again is due to an
idea of philosophy that present-day post-Wittgensteinian philosophy
shares with much analytic moral philosophy: the idea of philosophy as
conceptual work understood in contrast to empirical work. The respective
ideas of what conceptual work is are rather different in these two tradi-
tions, and in fact, on a closer view, they both exhibit internal plurality
in this respect. For early analytic philosophy it was conceptual analysis
in a quite literal sense, a dividing into smaller and more basic parts.
In contemporary analytic moral philosophy conceptual work is done in

terms of theory: a theory of love, a theory of intentionality, trying to elicit
what “love” or “intentionality” really mean. In ordinary language philo-
sophy it can be the tracing of a concept which is approached as immune to
definition or alternatively an attempt to trace the various ways in which we
speak about a phenomenon.
The case of analytic ethics and empirical input is under debate in
current discussions around x-phi and I will not return to that discussion
here. The relationship between conceptual investigations and empirical
input in post-Wittgensteinian ethics is a more urgent matter for the
purpose of articulating a broad descriptive approach to ethics. Post-
Wittgensteinian philosophy is a central part of present-day descriptive
work in ethics—in philosophical anthropology and the ethics-literature
discussion—but its self-understanding as “conceptual” may dictate a pro-
cedure which is not always representative of the best work in this tradition.
The idea of philosophy here is narrower than the actual practice at its best,
and it is the practice that I want to tap for the purposes of descriptive
ethics.
So let us look at the dispute around ordinary language philosophy in
practice. As Cavell puts it: “[Speakers of English] do not, in general, need
evidence for what is said in the language; they are the source of such
evidence. It is from them that the descriptive linguist takes the corpus
of utterances on the basis of which he will construct a grammar of
that language” (Stanley Cavell 1976, p. 4). The distinction between
“native speaker” (grammatical and conceptual) competence in a language
and empirical knowledge about a language, introduced here, is an
obviously useful one. It helps us to keep the spontaneous, practically
learned capacity of a native speaker apart from the explicit knowledge
that a linguist gathers in his work. The former constitutes the source of
the material which the latter is to describe. The former (grammatical
competence) is independent from the latter (the linguist’s knowledge),
although the linguist’s data are frequently used to issue official recom-
mendations, which again have an impact on language use. The latter is
wholly dependent on the former: At least in the case of natural languages
there is no linguistics without native speaker competence; linguists are
there to describe the contents of this competence.
Cavell’s point is that the native speaker’s knowledge of his language is
not essentially empirical, not a matter of evidence, but more like a basic
capacity, and that consulting this capacity in philosophy is no stranger
than consulting empirical knowledge about language. The philosophical

work envisioned by Wittgenstein is mainly directed at the inner workings
of this capacity. Wittgenstein believes that many philosophical problems
are at least partly caused by entanglements in our linguistic practice. We
start using words in ways where they fail to mean, that is, they fail to do
any kind of substantial work, fail to communicate. We could suggest that
the age-old and supposedly profound question “What is truth?” is a
question of this kind. There is no such “thing” in the world as “truth,”
and thus any attempt to explain the nature of “truth” is bound to fail.
To be rid of this assumed “thingy” character of “truth” we need to pay
attention to how we would normally use the word and what kind of
work it does in these uses. We need to look at our capacity to use the
word in meaningful ways, from our own point of view as speakers, users
of language.
Consulting a linguist or “counting noses” in order to sort out this kind
of case would be beside the point, in the sense that the linguist’s external
knowledge about frequencies of use, and so on, could not bring us back to
our own internal grasp of where the word works properly. Thus, insofar as
Wittgenstein’s philosophy is about helping us to find our way about in our
own native speaker’s competence, we must be able to distinguish this
competence from mere “knowledge about” a language and realize that
we “know” things about our own language in a way quite different from
the way the linguist knows his target language.
So, to illuminate the nature of our linguistic and philosophical entan-
glements we need to remind us, from the inside, so to say, of how our
language works when it works well. We need to describe, as accurately as
possible, such unproblematic use. But this “descriptive work,” combined
with a prohibition against any “empirical” evidence to the contrary, is
precisely what triggers the feeling in the ordinary language philosopher’s
interlocutor that he is being taken for a ride. “What do you mean by mere
description, when you are actually describing a use of language which is
far from ordinary?”
Furthermore, the prohibition against empirical evidence includes not
only evidence concerning language use, but typically also evidence con-
cerning the things talked about. Conceptual inquiries are, following
Wittgenstein’s lead in § 109, considered as inquiries where what we
need to know is already there in our native speaker’s competence. This
prohibition invites Raimond Gaita, for example, to postulate that it would
be absurd to say that spiders may have a rich inner life, because “rich inner
life” is conceptually not applicable to spiders, and furthermore, that this

is not a case to be solved by learning more about spiders (Gaita 2003;
Hämäläinen 2012).
It is easy to see how the practice can be misused, precisely to enforce a
given, even rather tendentious description of “how we speak,” produ-
cing Kafkaesque scenes where an innocent interlocutor is bullied into
conformity with a judgment about ordinary language use that to him
seems just plain wrong. But there is something important missing in
these scenes of enforced conformity, and that is the tentativeness of
Wittgenstein’s appeal to community. If Cavell’s discussion shows some
naivety concerning the practical implementation of the “what we should
say when,” it is because he counts on an idea of a philosophical con-
versation as a search for a community of judgment. The philosopher’s
appeal to ordinary language is, in this view, always to be seen as an appeal
to the interlocutor to accept the offered picture of “ordinary” or to help
modify it in a way which rings true to the partners in conversation. The
practice of referring to how we ordinarily speak relies on the possibility of
finding a shared, satisfactory picture of ordinary language use—of what
words mean or how they work—that the participants in a conversation
can agree upon. It is about finding common ground. Its philosophical
power lies in the recognition, by each participant, of a given under-
standing of ordinariness and a shared understanding of some uses,
for example, “metaphysical” ones, as strained or potentially empty. In
this view, there is no philosophical gain in enforcing one’s own concep-
tual point of view on an interlocutor. There is no philosophical value in
“knowing” ordinary language use, in a conversation where one’s con-
versation partner is recalcitrant. This aspect of the practice is difficult,
because it seems to go against the seemingly commonsense idea that
philosophy is an argumentative practice, where the target is to convince
one’s interlocutor of a truth that one holds.
The central point of comparison for Cavell (1976, pp. 86–96) is what
he sees as Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgments: These are neither the
subjective likings nor dislikings imagined by emotivists, nor the observa-
tion of obvious factual features of the world, but rather invitations to a
community of judgment. To say before a painting “this dash of red right
here is beautiful” is not to ejaculate mere liking, nor to state a fact about
the colors on the canvas, but to invite to a shared appreciation of the work.
What is important here is the constitution of a “we” that is inclusive and
inviting. We can briefly compare this “we” with Foucault’s, which exhibits
both central differences and an interesting similarity. Foucault’s central

question in relation to the “we” concerns its genealogy: What are the
institutions, thought structures, and practices that have come to constitute
us as the kinds of creatures we are: modern human beings? This requires
an understanding of what it is like to be part of our wide community
of modern individuals, but the studies to which Foucault directs his
reader are empirical and historical, data and texts. They take a look at us
from the outside, so to say, turning our world into an object of historical
and empirical observation. But the boundaries of the “we” (as in
Wittgenstein’s case) are not drawn in advance. The “we” is a form of
address, an invitation to those who recognize themselves as children of a
certain past and members of a certain present.
Wittgenstein’s “we”, if we follow Cavell’s interpretation, is somewhat
differently put together. He relies on the possibility and facticity of a
“we” in order to talk about aspects of our shared life that tend to be
distorted by theory. There is no story of becoming, no institutional basis
for drawing boundaries. But, like in the case of Foucault, there is an appeal
to the reader to share: in this case to share a mode of judgment, to unlearn
theoretical habits, and to consult one’s first-person judgment as speaker of
a language and participant in a range of linguistic and moral practices.
If we understand the call to philosophical community as a task strictly
internal to our competence as (native) speakers, there would supposedly
not be a case of learning more about our language or the things it refers to,
because we already know, as competent speakers of a language, what we
need to know. We may merely, sometimes, need to make it visible for
ourselves, insofar as we are not always transparent to ourselves in words
and deeds.
But this cannot be right, because our concepts and our linguistic
practices are neither homogenous nor stable. They evolve under the
pressure of changes in our ways of living and also under the somewhat
lighter pressure of constant use. They are, as Wittgenstein put it, part of
our natural history, but also part of our history simpliciter. The conceptual
absurdity of the claim that man has been on the moon discussed by
Wittgenstein in On Certainty (1969) is vulnerable to the subsequent fact
that man actually has been on the moon. Have our concepts of man,
moon, or space travel changed? Or have the concepts remained the same
while our knowledge has changed or our world has changed? I think we
should not answer these questions with too much confidence. Conceptual
change is the reorganization of our worldview, local or global. In this
process we rely on both agreement and disagreement, sameness and

heterogeneity of understanding and judgment.
The “conceptual” nature of philosophy does not provide a case for
excluding empirical evidence, either about language use or about the
objects talked about, because both are natural parts of the negotiation of
common ground that is necessary for a working ordinary language philo-
sophy. Empirical evidence concerning language use is called for when the
mode of speaking proposed as ordinary is in fact quite idiosyncratic or
shaped by the philosopher’s theoretical concerns. Empirical evidence con-
cerning the objects of discussion is relevant when a proposed conceptual
truth turns out to be problematic on the basis of different knowledge of
the object itself. A prohibition against empirical concerns is a specific form
of sabotage of the search for a common ground; it is the postulation
of conceptual “bedrock” at a stage when not half of the resources for a
negotiation of communality have been used.
But the validity of Wittgenstein’s insistence on descriptive/conceptual/
grammatical investigation is not here ultimately at stake. What I have been
concerned with here is the habitual way in which it is contrasted with the
(broadly) empirical, and how the empirical is rendered suspicious under its
auspices. Philosophy is a conceptual endeavor; it is about working on the
ways we think about and articulate the world. Its target is not the accumu-
lation of knowledge, but the articulation of a helpful, functional, and novel
way of conceptualizing some aspect of our relation to and view of the
world. This work encompasses two distinctive gestures. One is the broadly
Wittgensteinian recovering of “what we did not know we knew,” which is
present in the practice of “what we say when” as well as in the attention to
literature as means of getting a grasp of our own form of life. The other is
the multifaceted endeavor to complement and alter our understanding of
our world through the accumulation of knowledge about our forms of life,
institutions, practices, and language. Wittgensteinians have a certain ten-
dency to remain too persistently within the project of recovering what we in
some sense already have. My current use of Foucault and Dewey might
seem to come with the opposite danger, of doing away with philosophical
orientation in the eclectic accumulation of historical and sociological data.
But for Foucault, Dewey, and Taylor, as for Wittgenstein, the philosophical
question of “where we live” and the difficulty of seeing what is most
ordinary, are constantly foregrounded as central to philosophy.
Allowing that philosophical investigations into our forms of life and
our lives in language may include empirical considerations, that our
conceptualizations are sensitive to empirical input, is necessary in order

to liberate the potentials of Wittgenstein’s work for the use of moral
philosophy. Nonetheless, we need to have here a very clear understanding
of what empirical, experimental, or experiential input does, and what it
cannot do. Empirical input, or “facts” of one kind or the other, cannot
provide answers to philosophical questions. But empirical, historical, lin-
guistic knowledge can transform the discursive situation in a variety of
ways. The modern self, traced back to its various historical roots, gives us a
very different philosophical discussion of selfhood than an idea of the
human self as ahistorical, universal, and constant. A linguist’s perspective
on the use of a disputed concept may reveal at the center of a philosophical
debate a highly, though unintentionally, idiosyncratic use of a word.
Scientific research about animal cognition may fundamentally alter things
taken for granted about the human–animal divide in philosophy of mind
or ethics. A different set of insights will make different questions interest-
ing and different ideas plausible for the people involved in philosophical
inquiry. A given historical account of selfhood may make essentialist ideas
of selfhood look problematic. Seeing the idiosyncrasy of one’s concepts
may prompt a different philosophical analysis of them. Acquiring a better
understanding of animals is likely to make some positions concerning their
moral claims look tendentious and dishonest. All of this is, of course, a
matter of various judgments on the behalf of the reflective communities of
philosophers or others engaged in puzzlements that we recognize as
philosophical. But we need to be very cautious with the gesture of ruling
the empirical out of philosophy, because in this ruling out, intellectual
mistakes are easily made, and we end up with an isolated and truncated
form of conceptual exercises, instead of philosophy.
Regardless of the different methods and materials suggested by our four
philosophers, there is one central idea that they share regarding the role
and nature of philosophy. For each of them philosophy is an activity which
proceeds from where we stand in thinking, and proceed from there in a
reflective and self-critical manner, to bring order, depth, and clarity to our
understanding of the various issues in which we are engaged. This means
that philosophy for them is an essentially nondogmatic endeavor, in the
sense that its aim is not systematic doctrine or the fixation of the best
theoretical perspective. It is rather a continuous activity to accompany
our changing lives: Philosophical questions change when our lives and
concepts and practical problems change. These philosophers are of course
not alone with this idea: It is shared by philosophers of many persuasions.
But the way they combine this point of view with a vigilant investigation of
our forms of life—the conceptual, moral, metaphysical, social, historical,
existential place in which our questions present themselves as pressing—
gives us a good idea of what moral philosophical inquiry can be when it is
not the pursuit of normative or metaethical theory, or some of the activ-
ities derived from these. Moral philosophy in this sense is a fundamentally
self-critical activity, not one where we seek to convince our interlocutors
of the rightness of our theory, but one where our own moral concepts,
certainties and uncertainties, and valuations are under scrutiny. It is always
fundamentally preliminary, incomplete, and in progress.
Here I want to quote Mary Midgley, who notes that “philosophy, in
spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we
always have to use it when things get difficult” (Midgley 2005, p. xii).
Philosophy, in this sense, is not an exclusive domain for philosophers,
but a dimension of thinking: a work that the thinker brings to bear on
his own thinking, its presuppositions, its conditions, and its subject, the
thinker himself.
CHAPTER 11
Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher
Abstract Hämäläinen discusses the philosopher’s distinctive role in the

furtherance of a descriptive ethics. Drawing on Max Weber she argues that
the current academic specialization and compartmentalization is a natural
consequence of a certain idea of expertise and scientific work. But the kind
of specialization that may well be in place in the sciences is ill suited to
philosophy, because it severs the philosophical work from the real-life
intelligence and concerns of the philosopher. In contrast to this, the
descriptive moral philosopher must often relinquish the benefits of scho-
larly and technical expertise, and be a dilettante and an intellectual.
Keywords Specialization Max Weber Expertise in ethics
Moving toward the stage in this text where a conclusion should be drawn
from these reflections, we may want to ask two things: What are the
specific tasks of moral philosophy in the descriptive mode? And how are
they to be distinguished from the tasks that belong to anyone reflectively
engaged in an inquiry on morality and the good? The answer should be
short enough, but it cannot be formulated without taking us back to the
idea of the moral life and the limitations of analytic moral philosophy,
which was formulated in Chaps. 3 and 4: the idea of the moral life as a
present, contingent weave of practices, ideas, language, emotions—and

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9_11
the predicament of a moral philosophy which places our attempts to

understand this weave in a subsidiary position.
Every moral philosopher is throughout his life implicated in the incessant
talk and activity of a human society, which through life continues
to influence and remake his real-life judgments and evaluations. Yet, like
people in general, the moral philosophers of our time have only a limited
understanding of the practices they (we) are implicated in and are only to a
limited degree able to see them, as it were, from the outside. Moral philo-
sophers often have no more than average educated knowledge of common
moral beliefs, moral conflicts, moral education, or moral history. And thus
they often have little more than an average understanding of the complex
backgrounds of their own judgments. There are of course great exceptions
to this rule: philosophers who have taken special interest in the varieties of
lived morality in human societies. But these types of interest are more or less
seen as optional paths of academic specialization, not essential issues for any
philosopher interested in the workings of morality or normativity more
widely. This kind of specialization may indeed be necessary—considering
the mass of academic writing that is produced today—but it comes at a
certain cost: selective sight, partial blindness, inability to learn from others.
The contemporary ethics/literature discussion, mentioned earlier as
one of philosophy’s windows to the outside world, came about through
the efforts of people who just started including narrative literature, in a
range of ways, into their philosophical discussions. A number of individual
philosophers, most notably Nussbaum, have explicitly argued for the
inclusion of literature into ethics and attempted to lay down the terms
and conditions for such an inclusion. But the real force of literature in
ethics has nothing to do with a settled methodology for the use of
literature in moral philosophy. What is important is (1) that the use of
literature has been made ok and (2) that this “ok” occasionally produces
writings that make a real difference to how we think, open up new
possibilities, and help us reconnect our philosophical work to our sprout-
ing, everyday vernacular thinking. (Which texts make a difference in this
sense can vary from reader to reader.)
Similarly, attention to the various nonliterary, nonphilosophical texts,
that carry and express our everyday normative practices, does not require
that we can provide definite answers to our various methodological ques-
tions. (I talk about texts here, because they present an easily available kind
of material for the philosopher, of whom we should perhaps not expect
actual fieldwork.) There are of course a number of questions that can be
11 DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS AND THE PHILOSOPHER 119
asked: How do these texts reflect or affect actual moral understanding?

How should they be considered: as examples, as thinking in their own right,
as conglomerates of oppressive norms? What do we seek in them: reality,
psychology, guidance? What is a good way to analyze them? Do women’s
magazines and popular self-help books require different ways of reading?
And how about more “serious” documents like, say, information brochures
for new parents, alcoholics, people with eating disorders? Or peer-to-peer
texts, blogs, and web discussions? Such questions are important, to keep us
aware of the variety of concerns that may form our inquiries.
Yet a meaningful attention to morally interesting texts, contexts, and
everyday practices will not be brought about through answering these ques-
tions in the abstract. One answer to the question how to make these texts
more available is rather simple: Write about them, include them, take an
interest. Methodology, as much of one as we need, will ensue. I think this is
true, but we must also see that it is a simplification, because the difficulty is a
structural one and this structure is kept in place by certain structures on a
larger scale: the structures of academic expertise. Let me explain.
One obstacle to a more inclusive approach to the study of our moral
lives is constituted by a cluster of persistent ideas: that the current level
and kind of real-life input into moral philosophy is sufficient, that
moral philosophers do know a great deal about things moral and can
work accordingly, and that what is excluded is excluded for a good
reason (as trivial, as nonphilosophical, sociological, historical). Often it
is obvious, though, that academic moral philosophers pursue academic
inquiries which are hermetically sealed off from their own various,
lively and untidy real-life knowledge about morality, moral attitudes,
and moral changes. Attention to moral and normative practices in our
present time would help philosophers to bridge the gap between their
real-life knowledge and their professional knowledge.
The other thing that stands in the way of an inclusive approach is moral
philosophy’s mode of organization, around the activities of normative
theory and metaethics, both of them pursuits which are impervious to
input from the study of cultural phenomena and practices. If a moral
philosopher recognizes the first encumbrance and seeks to complement
his understanding of morality through a descriptive, empirically informed
study of society and cultural phenomena, he will immediately be met by
the second encumbrance, because his study will place itself at the margins
of moral philosophy. For a young scholar it makes much more sense either
to move sideways into another discipline (social theory, cultural studies,
science and technology studies, communication studies, comparative

literature) than to persist in the margins of analytic moral philosophy.
Alternatively he may find an academic home in post-Wittgensteinian
philosophy or, say, phenomenology, adopting the paraphernalia for a
successful career in these contexts. In either case, his efforts will be largely
lost for analytic ethics. And thus this discipline, which parades as moral
philosophy simpliciter, will remain largely unaware of its dissident
members and their reasons for doing things differently. Unless, that is,
they manage to brand themselves, as the x-phi researchers have done. As
noted, the relative success of moral x-phi has been made possible by the
fact that these researchers have a quite specific research program: the use
of experimental methods to test aspects of people’s moral thought and
behavior. This is not a solution for bringing about the change that I am
looking for, because philosophical, descriptive ethics is not a specific kind
of study for which a methodology can be formulated. It includes all the
ways in which philosophers participate in an empirically informed study of
“the moral beliefs and practices of different peoples and cultures in
various places and times.”1 It contains many different philosophical pro-
jects and gestures, different ideas of the respective roles of empirical study
and conceptual inquiry, different ways of understanding the normative/
evaluative dimension of moral philosophy. It is not so much a direction of
moral philosophical study as it is a different principle of assembling the
philosophical study of morals: one that will allow the moral philosopher
to know more about morality.
Am I thus suggesting that the pursuits of moral theory or metaethics
are useless and potentially harmful for our understanding of morals?
This was indeed the view of late-twentieth-century “anti-theorists,” like
Annette Baier (1985), Peter Winch (1987), and D. Z. Phillips (1992). It
also seems to be the view of some historians of philosophy, although
they tend to be politely less vocal about it. But this is not the point that
I want to make—or rather, making this point would not be very helpful.
R. G. Collingwood notes in An Essay on Philosophical Method that
a philosopher should always be “confessing his difficulties,” because
good philosophy is “essentially confession, a search by the mind for its
own failings and an attempt to remedy them by recognizing them”
(Collingwood 2005, p. 210). Following this very strictly would produce
a rather obnoxious kind of philosophy, but I think it is sometimes essential
to be very frank about how one sees things, even if the result is not a
polished position. My critique of main stream moral philosophy, its
priorities, its internal organization, is a case for confessing difficulty. To

me it seems that losing moral theory and metaethics (if such a thing could
be imagined in today’s philosophy) would be genuine and quite handicap-
ping losses, because these discussions and traditions contain a variety of
views, ideas, and insights that would quickly be reinvented ex nihilo if
they were erased from the students’ curriculum. And they would not be
improved by this procedure: I have seen the most ardent anti-theorists
invent their own kitchen varieties of monistic, explanatory, normative
moral theory, without realizing what they do and how they link to past
work. Nonetheless, the contemporary array of technically sophisticated
theories of moral conduct, moral ontology, and so on seems to be of quite
marginal interest, if we think of the moral philosopher as a person who
seeks to understand the phenomenon we call morality or ethics. This does
not mean that I would consider them pointless or irrelevant: just that they
do not add up to any very helpful picture of the moral life. It is too easy to
imagine a student who is philosophically talented and interested in mor-
ality above all, but who is forced to turn away from contemporary moral
philosophy because it does not feed her interest.
As I emphasized at the beginning, however, the roots of the current
situation of moral philosophy are not to be sought in any particular failure
on the part of the philosophers, but in a more general problem related to
the specialized nature of modern academic endeavors and how the nature
of academic research goes together with the nature of philosophy. This is
not a new problem. As Max Weber noted concerning academic contribu-
tions, in his “Wissenshaft als Beruf” in 1922: “A really definitive and good
accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And who-
ever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and come up to the
idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the
correct conjecture at this passage of his manuscript may as well stay away
from science” (Weber 2009, p. 135).
To do science or research in modern times means for Weber to be
enthusiastically engaged with details of a whole, which one knows well and
handles systematically, but which one does not control and which one may
be unable to evaluate or even grasp as a whole. Gone is the time when the
man of science could be a universalist, at home in different sciences as well
as in the arts. This is the case not only for the natural sciences, but also for
the social sciences, which, in Weber’s time as in ours, are porous and
constantly open up toward other forms of knowledge and inquiry. “All
work that overlaps neighboring fields, such as we occasionally undertake
and which sociologists must necessarily undertake again and again, is

burdened with the resigned realization that at best one provides the
specialist with useful questions upon which he would not so easily hit
from his own specialized point of view” (Ibid., pp. 134–135). Weber does
not deny a place in the sciences for work which strays from the path of
strict expertise; he rather emphasizes that such work must be done as well.
What he denies this kind of work is the status of definite contribution. The
dilettante, he notes, may well contribute to the furtherance of science, but
“he is usually not in the position to control, to estimate, or to exploit the
idea in its bearings” (Ibid. p. 136). And we are all dilettantes outside our
arduously claimed areas of expertise.
What is the significance of this sociologist’s reflections nearly a hundred
years later, and for philosophy? Philosophy had in those early decades of
the twentieth century shed a few of its branches to new fields of science.
What was left of philosophy, too, harbored a hope of entering “der
Sicheren gang einer Wissenschaft”—a hope which has now long since
been abandoned. Nonetheless, the study of philosophy today is more
than ever defined by the demand for definite contributions in relatively
narrow fields of expertise. The main reason for this is the sheer quantity
and easy availability of research, for anyone who has access to a university
library. Peer-reviewed journal publishing, which today is the best sup-
ported and most prestigious form of publishing, is a form which strongly
encourages small and expert contributions. To make such contributions
one had better read the right things, which means that one must figure out
what the right things are. And since so many things could be right, there
need to be relatively strict rules of relevance that are implicitly or explicitly
negotiated within research communities.
Analytic moral philosophers know their own current debates well, but
may be completely oblivious of the recent history of their discipline or the
ways their questions and themes overlap with work in other traditions of
contemporary philosophy, not to speak of other disciplines. The work in
analytic philosophy is organized around contemporary professional
debates that act as proxies for the perennial questions of Western philo-
sophy. Thus the question of the nature of morals can be translated into a
debate over realism, noncognitivism, or quasi-realism, which gives quite a
lot to read for any student, but is not unmanageable. Pragmatists, phe-
nomenologists, Wittgensteinians form their own communities which exhi-
bit a strong scholarly emphasis on reading the old and new classics in one’s
own tradition. In this honorable mode of scholarly philosophizing, one may
choose to work on a big philosophical question through a prominent

philosopher: on the nature of language through Wittgenstein, on embodi-
ment through Merleau-Ponty, on love through Murdoch, on skepticism
through Cavell. The debate or scholarly context provides thinking with its
framework, its trials, and its distinctiveness. The fact that other scholars
have mined a text before me enriches my reading indefinitely. Similarly, a
thorough acquaintance with the moves that have been made in a field of
analytic philosophy will certainly make our contribution more technically
sophisticated, definite, and distinctive. But academic specialization has
two central drawback that may be fatal to the pursuits of philosophy. The
first one is the branching off of discussions that have a very short memory
and little knowledge of other ongoing discussions in philosophy. A case in
point is the way ordinary language philosophy has been cut away from the
general consciousness of analytic philosophers, to the point that rather
confused ideas of what it is are circulated as facts.2 We saw an example of
this in the Knobe case, where basically no one seems to be aware (or
acknowledge awareness of the fact) that the “radical” musings of Knobe
are perfectly unsurprising in branches of philosophy which parted ways with
mainstream analytic philosophy no earlier than the 1960s (if they ever did).
Academic practice is bolstered by comfort in the boundaries of one’s own
subfield and a professional, willed ignorance of other things.
The second drawback is the way academic specialization severs the
philosophical questions from their place in our everyday lives, from that
moment of initial asking, and all the extra-philosophical stuff that this
asking is connected to. Murdoch famously noted that “there is a two-way
movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate
theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and
obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he
has just had his breakfast. Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to
it” (2001, p. 1). We could borrow and modify this observation by noting a
movement between philosophical contributions made deep within an
academic discussion and the consideration of the very same things outside
the academic setting. If the movement is arrested and we stay put within
the academic discussion, the exercise will lose both its stringency and
eventually also its raison d’être.
Cavell has in a related spirit talked about some philosophical, theore-
tical, scholarly pursuits in philosophy as deflections from the initial ques-
tions or issues that gave rise to philosophizing (Cavell et al. 2008). The
problems of philosophical skepticism are according to Cavell philosophical
transformations of a fundamental doubt and longing for guarantees that

may beset us in quite ordinary situations of life (Cavell 2003). Here I do
not take a stand on Cavell’s discussion of skepticism, but I find the idea
that some philosophical problems might be deflections from our ordinary
or real-life problems a very useful one. This is something we may often ask
when doing philosophy: What are the roots of a given philosophical
question in ordinary life? And what does the philosophical work do to
the initial problem? Are the things done in and through philosophizing in
any way useful for addressing the prior questions and issues? Does the
philosophical discussion or account allow us to travel the distance between
theoretical discourse and the questions that may have given rise to it? Does
the theoretical discourse, in a given situation, have its own role and
legitimacy, independent of how it can be brought back to the real or the
ordinary? Or is it an activity wholly dependent, for its meaningfulness, on
the possibility of bringing it to bear again on questions external to aca-
demic philosophy?
The idea of philosophical deflection is useful for making clear how
complicated the relationship between philosophical-theoretical discourse
and questions in ordinary life may be. Cavell observes that philosophical
questions and quandaries are already there in our ordinary experiences.
This is certainly the case with morality, where the impulse to question the
basis and interconnections of different norms and ideals is close at hand,
quite regardless of any familiarity with the practices of philosophy. The
relevant untheoretical or pre-theoretical counterpart to moral philosophy
is the complex web of real-life morality that we seek to clarify, administer,
and even modify by means of theoretical discourse. The question to be
posed again and again, necessary for philosophy, is: How does the theore-
tical discourse relate to our moral lives, frameworks, culture? Also: What
are our moral life, frameworks, culture like?
We may think that this is obvious, that we do this kind of question-
ing all the time, when doing moral philosophy. But the movement back
and forth, in and out of theoretical discourse, is not without problems
for the professional philosopher, because philosophy, like other areas of
academic research, sorts under the specialization and compartmentali-
zation of scientific work, where a definite and distinctive contribution
is always a local one. Within academic, theoretical, or scholarly work
the philosopher is a scientist of sorts, competent in the literature and
methodology relevant for the academic discussion at hand. But the
two-way movement, necessary for philosophy, also necessarily thrusts
the philosopher out of the zone of professional expertise, to questions,

concerns, and insight in relation to which he is a dilettante, a non-
professional, untrained, and unsystematic thinker. Philosophy pursued
merely in the professional and theoretical mode may be technically
complex and highly challenging, but it quickly loses both its specifically
philosophical nature and its capacity to matter to our thinking outside
philosophy.
A particularly charming passage from Wittgenstein may help us raise the
question concerning the value of pure expert contributions in philosophy.
“Compare the solution of philosophical problems to the gift in the fairy-
tale that magically appears in the enchanted castle and when one looks at it
outside in daylight, it is nothing but an ordinary piece of iron (or some-
thing similar)” (1998b, p. 11). Whether or not we share Wittgenstein’s
overall misgivings concerning purported solutions to philosophical pro-
blems, most of us can probably think of some cases where the glittering
solution to a problem loses all its charms when brought out into daylight.
At an interdisciplinary conference we may find ourselves utterly unable to
explain why some given problem is so important in our field and why a
given answer is so good, not because there are technical details too
complex to explain, but because neither question nor answer quite sur-
vives the transfer into another setting. I do not evoke the image of the
enchanted castle here in order to dismiss specialized philosophical and
theoretical work. Expert discourse—technical, theoretical, and scholarly—
is necessary for the furtherance of philosophical knowledge, and philoso-
phy, like other academic disciplines, requires a capacity, on behalf of its
practitioners, to be captivated by details and small movements within a
given body of understanding. It requires its own enchanted castles into
which we are introduced, more or less successfully, through arduous
study. Without the enclosures, the specialized practices, the magic sur-
rounding them, we would not have science, scholarship, or advanced
thinking, which is always necessarily thinking in a tradition. But the
more consistently we stay within the enchanted castle of philosophy, the
poorer will our ability be to judge and to weigh what we have found.
The perfect scientist, at least in the natural sciences, can be a narrow expert
through and through, but the perfect philosopher must frequently be a
dilettante in Weber’s sense, reaching out to think and to judge in areas
outside his expertise.
Of course neither “the ordinary” nor “the academic” constitute
distinctive, clearly bounded categories. Philosophy can also forge new
habitual ways of traveling the distance between the academic and the
ordinary, so that this movement loses its reflective character. We can, in
various philosophical discussions, find examples of external insights that
have been domesticated into the professional competence and the
expected repertoire. The discussion on ethics and literature has domesti-
cated certain ideas about ordinary moral experience, such as the impor-
tance of perceptiveness. Reference to the role of perceptiveness in a given
literary work, which some 30 years ago worked as a kind of excursion out
of the realm of philosophical expertise to “ordinary experience,” has now
been transformed into a basic tenet of the philosophical discourse around
ethics and literature. Similarly, some pieces of psychological research
offered in the late twentieth century a window out of the professional
tenets of philosophy, but have to a certain extent been domesticated, so
that they belong to the basic philosophical repertoire. Such new acquisi-
tions in the bodies of professional philosophical discussions may be ben-
eficial for the discussions to which they are appended. Both narrative
literature and insights from cognitive psychology can provide representa-
tions of morality that are illuminating in the role of philosophy’s “other,”
as ways of reaching after knowledge about our moral lives. But they do not
bring fresh new air to the inquiry, if the same insights are used repetitively.
A habitual professionalized movement between, say, ethics and narrative
renderings of moral experience does not replace the necessary two-way
movement between philosophy and “the ordinary.”
Hanna Arendt noted in The Human Condition (1998) that it is the task
of every great thinker to present an uncompromising original vision of the
world. But no matter how attractive we may find this image of originality,
we should not be too eager to embrace the insipid role it leaves for the rest
of us. It is not a privilege of the great to be occasionally a dilettante
dabbling outside the academically known, while the rest of us labor
professionally within the given philosophic–scientific discussions. The
practice of philosophy does not require philosopher stars who manage to
establish new ways of moving beyond the given academic debate
(although these may have an important role too), but rather ordinary
philosophers who are able and willing to travel the distances between
philosophy and ordinary life again and again on their own, in the most
lowly and unglamorous manner, seeking philosophical guidance in their
own evolving experience.
Let us suppose that we all have a mobile, developing, multifaceted
vernacular of thought, which we use when engaging in discussions over
politics or a movie or child rearing, for example. It is not unaffected by

what we do and learn professionally, within our scientific persuasions, but
more than this it is shaped by the various other forms of life in which we
participate. It is the medium of much of our nonprofessional thinking, a
medium where we are at home when we are not performing any given
scientific belonging. It is the language within language in which we can
express disappointment with what academic philosophy as a whole has
offered us, or air worries concerning the unemployment rate. If we can
localize such a language for ourselves, we are well prepared for the two-
way movement of philosophy. Much of the descriptive endeavor of moral
philosophy must be pursued in this vernacular; this endeavor must be
based on our ordinary ways of negotiating our ordinary concerns. It
requires a relaxation of the scientific mindset, if such a thing is possible.
Philosophy as a modern scientific vocation encourages us to make
small, distinctive, professional contributions that are easily understandable
to our peers, but often impenetrable for others. This is not a bad thing as
such, but a tendency in philosophical work that must be kept in place and
complemented with a variety of observations that belong to the vernacu-
lar, that are extra-scientific, sometimes tentative, and crude. Perhaps
the philosopher’s distinctive role in a descriptive ethics does not lie in a
specific set of philosophical questions, the reading of philosophical texts,
or the participation in philosophical debates, but rather in the role that
personal, vernacular reflection, personal vision, has even in the most
humble research tasks. The philosopher’s task in the multidisciplinary
endeavor of descriptive ethics is to be the jack of all trades, who does
not have a clear methodology, but who vigilantly and self-critically inves-
tigates his own concepts, beliefs, and background assumptions whenever
“things,” in Midgley’s phrase, “get difficult.”
An attempt to individual and collective self-scrutiny could include the
asking of questions such as the following: What does my/our inquiry
“know” about morality? What kind of data does my/our system allow
for? What did I just feed into that tube? As Murdoch famously noted: “A
narrow or partial selection of phenomena may suggest certain particular
techniques which will in turn seem to lend support to that particular
selection; and then a circle is formed out of which it may be hard to
break” (Murdoch 1997, p. 76). I would also like to borrow a methodo-
logical injunction from Hacking, who writes that “I help myself to what-
ever I can, from everywhere.”3 The immediate trouble with this is that
we will need to know or figure out what to do with a new selection of
materials and assumptions; we need to be more independent and take

both the selections made by others and procedures tried out by others less
for granted. There is no proper place for normal science in philosophy.
The immediate reward is that we can make moral philosophy matter more
for our everyday moral, prudential, and existential concerns.
NOTES
1. This is the formulation from the Web-Encyclopaedia Britannica quoted in
the introduction.
2. For example, Soames (2010), in an influential introduction to contemporary
philosophy of language, seems to hold that ordinary language philosophy is
a (failed) theory of language. But as Hacking (1975) notes, language, for
the philosophers of the linguistic turn, was not the object of study but a
medium which we need to understand in order to get at all the things we use
language to talk about.
3. In full: “What role should social studies have in historical ontology? This is
precisely the kind of methodological question that I find useless. I help
myself to whatever I can, from everywhere” (Hacking 2004, p. 17).
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INDEX
A C
Academic writing, 118 Cavell, Stanley, 17, 64, 67–68,
Analytic moral philosophy, 3–4, 8, 13, 109–110, 112–113, 123–124
18, 23, 34, 42–43, 45, 88, 109, Certeau, Michel de, 108
117, 120 Coetzee, J. M, 68
Anscombe, Elizabeth, 19, 22 Cognitive science, 39
Anti-foundationalist, 29 Collingwood, R. G., 120
Anti-metaphysical, 51–52 Communication, 50, 69, 119
Anti-theory, 5 Comparative ethics, 2
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 21, 38, 43 Conceptual investigation, 46, 64,
Applied ethics, 1, 22, 28 109–110
Archeological method, 76 Contractarian, 34
Archeology, 33 Critical thinking, 30–32
Arendt, Hanna, 126 Cultural philosophy, 2
Aristotle, 8, 31, 95
Articulation, 3, 44, 46, 63–65, 88,
107, 114 D
Attitude of modernity, 85–86 Deontological, 34, 42
Austin, J. L., 56, 69, 109 Descartes, Renée, 8, 98
Ayer, A. J, 28, 32 Description, 3–4, 5, 12–13, 25,
33–34, 41, 53, 60, 63, 68–69, 87,
102, 108, 111–112
B Descriptive ethics, 2–3, 6, 13, 18–19,
Baier, Annette, 4–5, 120 25, 34, 46, 60, 63, 70, 74, 76–77,
Baudelaire, Charles, 86–87 80, 83, 87, 92, 98, 102,
Benatar, David, 16–17 107–108, 110, 112
Booth, Wayne, 65 Hämäläinen, 74, 112

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58617-9
136 INDEX
Dewey, John, 5, 33, 45, 59–60, Genealogy, 33, 92, 98, 103,
62–63, 68, 70, 73–74, 78, 83–84, 105, 113
87–88, 107–108, 114 Goffman, Alice, 8
Diamond, Cora, 5, 17, 60, 65–66, 68 Grammatical, 108, 110, 114
Greene, Joshua, 42
Gutting, Gary, 77, 79
E
Early analytic philosophy, 28, 52, 109
H
Eflective equilibrium, 30
Habermas, Jurgen, 30, 94
Empirical research, 3, 15, 20–23, 37–38
Hacking, Ian, 19, 23, 68, 70, 79, 83,
Ends-in-view, 54
108, 127
Enlightenment, 82, 84–86, 104
Hard cases, 21–22,
Episteme, 78
Hare, R. M, 30, 32
Ethical theorist, 29
Heidegger, Martin, 52
Ethical theory, 1, 5, 27, 32, 64, 107,
Heuts & Mol, 56
116
Historicity, 46, 51, 74, 79, 84–85, 91
Ethics of attention, 33
Hochschild, Arlie, 8
Experimental philosophy, 5, 20–21
Human nature, 1, 4
38–39
Hursthouse, Rosalind, 34
Expertise, 38, 77, 83, 119, 122,
Hypergoods, 94–95, 102
124–126
Hypothetical, 4, 44, 63, 69–70, 88,
96, 108
Hypothetical deductive method, 44
F
Fieldwork in philosophy, 56
Foot, Philippa, 19, 34 I
Foots, 42 Identity, 9, 93, 96, 102, 104
Forsberg, Niklas, 5, 67 Intuition, 20, 23, 39–41, 43–44, 69
Fotion, Nick, 30–32, 50 Isen, Alice, 43
Foucault, Michel, 5, 19, 23, 31, 33,
46, 52, 69, 98, 102, 108,
112–114 J
Foundationalism, 29 Johnston, Paul, 60
Fourcade, Marion, 56, 70
Freedom, 33, 77, 79–80, 87–88,
93–94, 97, 104–105, 108 K
Kant, Immanuel, 8, 22, 30–31, 84–88,
93–94, 101, 112
Kierkegaard, Soren, 31, 33
G Kjellberg et al., 55
Gaita, Raimond, 60, 64, 111–112 Knobe, Joshua, 39
Genealogical method, 78 Kuhn, Thomas, 76
INDEX 137
L Neo-Hegelianism, 19
Levin, Paula, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 56, 74–76,
Lives in language, 64, 67, 73, 83, 107, 83, 95
114 Normative ethics, 2–3, 18–19, 27–29,
Logical empiricism, 52 32–33, 43, 45, 83, 102
Look and see, 61–62, 64, 68 Norms, 1, 10, 13, 24, 31–32, 34, 50,
92–93, 119, 124
Nussbaum, Martha, 17–18, 19,
M 29–31, 33–34, 93, 118
Malcolm, Norman, 66
Mates, Benson, 109
McIntyre, Alasdair, 18–19, 92
O
Meliorism, 33
Ontology, 2, 28, 52, 86, 121
Meliorist, 33
Ordinary language, 40–41, 67, 69,
Metaethics, 1–2, 4–5, 19, 27–28,
109, 123
32–34, 45, 119–121
Meta-philosophical, 33
Methodological, 10, 24, 29, 61–62,
104, 108, 118, 127 P
Methodological problems, 8 Phillips, D. Z., 65, 120
Methodology, 7–8, 118–120, 124, Pippin, Robert, 19
127 Plato, 22, 29, 31, 51, 98, 101
Midgely, Mary, 116, 127 Power, 11, 20, 56, 77, 80, 82, 100,
Moore, G. E., 22, 60, 123 103–105, 112
Moral discourse, 24 Pragmatism, 3–4
Moral histories, 15 Pragmatists, 9, 52, 122
Moral point of view, 44, 46 Putnam, Hilary, 41, 108
Moral psychology, 5, 22, 28, 38,
43–44
Moral source, 100–101 R
Mulhall, Stephen, 17 Rational grounds, 5, 29, 31–34, 49
Muniesa, Fabian, 55 Rawls, John, 8, 30
Murdoch, Iris, 4, 13, 33–34, 41, Realism, 4, 53, 122
68, 81, 93, 98, 100–102, 123, Reflective equilibrium, 30
127 Reflective practice, 50
Revisionist, 21, 87
Rieff, Philip, 8
N Rise of moral psychology, 37
Narrative literature, 15, 17, 28, 64, Rorty, Richard, 108
118, 126 Rose, Nikolas, 19, 83
Naturalism, 2, 97 Russell, Bertrand, 60, 66
138 INDEX
S Upton, Candace, 43
Self-care, 81 Utilitarian, 30, 34, 42, 88, 93
Self-formation, 81
Self-help, 24, 55–56,
81, 119
Self-knowledge, 5, 92 V
Situatedness, 18, 93, 97, 102 Valuation, 12, 45, 59, 83, 87, 94–95,
Slote, Michael, 34 102, 105, 107, 116
Spirituality, 92 Values, 1, 10, 13, 24, 41, 52–53,
Strong evaluations, 94–95, 97, 87–88, 91–93, 96–97, 100, 102,
101 104
Study of valuation, 56 Virtues, 1, 34, 61, 75, 83, 95, 101
W
T
Weber, Max, 9, 121–122, 125
Taylor, Charles, 5, 18–19, 33–34, 46,
Weil, Simone, 31
74, 82, 107–108, 114
Williams, Bernard, 5, 18, 34, 93
The moral present, 8, 10, 24, 46
Winch, Peter, 5, 64, 102, 120
Tolstoy, Leo, 66
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 5, 8, 40, 45,
Transcendence, 33, 88
51–52, 73–74, 79–80, 83–84, 87,
Transience, 88
102, 123, 125
Trolley cases, 16, 42
Wittgensteinian, 5, 9, 41, 74, 88, 102,
Two-way movement, 124, 127
108–110, 114, 120, 122
U
Universalist, 19, 121 X
Universality, 22, 84 X-phi, 20–21, 28, 109–110, 120

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Descriptive Ethics

Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies

ISBN 978-1-137-58616-2 ISBN 978-1-137-58617-9 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Academic writing is, with good reason, governed by an ideal of imperson-

arguing that such an approach would dissolve the problems surround-

This book was written as part of my work as a fellow of the Helsinki

1 Introduction—or What Does Moral Philosophy

2 Moral Philosophy Today 7

3 Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers 15

4 The Foundational Project of Ethics and a Different Way

5 The Challenge from X-phi 37

6 Dewey’s Empirical Ethics 49

8 Foucault’s Archeology and Genealogy of the Self 73

9 Charles Taylor’s Afﬁrmation of the Modern Self 91

10 The “Merely Descriptive” and the “Empirical” Revisited 107

11 Descriptive Ethics and the Philosopher 117

Introduction—or What Does Moral

Abstract Hämäläinen introduces the idea of descriptive ethics as a

Keyword Descriptive ethics

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2016 1

According to the (current) Encyclopaedia Britannica on the web

the empirical (observational) study of the moral beliefs and practices of

The contrasted normative ethics, in its turn, is described as

that part of moral philosophy, or ethics, concerned with criteria of what is

Metaethics, the constant companion of normative ethics in the ﬁeld of

Obviously some projects of descriptive ethics are left to others because

“below the surface” of everyday morality by providing rational grounds and

Moral Philosophy Today

Abstract Hämäläinen presents a methodological problem in contempor-

Keyword Moral present

What do we do when we do moral philosophy? Philosophy does not have a

© The Author(s) 2016 7

that one can simply go on using on new objects of inquiry or teach to a

Second, and more importantly, philosophy’s thin relation to the moral

2.1 EVERYDAY NORMATIVITY AND THE MORAL PRESENT

through political activity, such as consciousness raising. Some of the

Morality as Known by Moral Philosophers

Abstract This chapter presents ﬁve different ways in which contemporary

Keywords Intuition Ethics and narrative Moral histories Experimental

To get a clearer view of the nature of the descriptive limitations of con-

© The Author(s) 2016 15

assumptions or intuitions, we are inclined to start questioning the

3.2 NARRATIVE LITERATURE, FILM

ﬁlmmakers—are used as sounding boards for eliciting a more complex and

3.3 MORAL HISTORIES

Charles Taylor (1989), Alasdair McIntyre (1967, 1981), Bernard

of metaethics and moral theory, which are developed in a universalist and

3.4 EXPERIMENTAL AND EMPIRICAL ETHICS

reactions or behavior if we use it to jump to crude normative conclusions.

3.5 CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES AND CASES

3.6 THE TEXTURE OF OUR MORAL LIVES

individual philosophers from Plato through Kant to Moore and, say,

ﬁelds and traditions and use that learning in philosophically productive

The Foundational Project of Ethics

Abstract Modern moral philosophy has generally organized its inquiries

Keyword Normative ethics Metaethics

© The Author(s) 2016 27

cultural/historical/sociological/descriptive point of view, do we arrive

philosophy. “A strictly philosophical treatise on ethics should . . . make no